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VOL 50 / ISS 4 / FEB 2018
THE NEW JOURNAL
BUT IT’S
YOU Do our sex offender laws actually make communities safer? 1
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editors-in-chief Eliza Fawcett Natalie Yang managing editor Victorio Cabrera executive editor Ruby Bilger senior editors Jacob Sweet Oriana Tang associate editors Antonia Ayres-Brown Chris Hays Mark Rosenberg Annie Rosenthal Robert Scaramuccia Arya Sundaram copy editors Philippe Chlenski Marina Tinone Amy Xu
reporting supported by the Edward Bennett III Memorial Fund members and directors Emily Bazelon, Peter Cooper, Jonathan Dach, Kathrin Lassila, Elizabeth Sledge, Jim Sleeper, Fred Strebeigh, Aliyya Swaby advisors Neela Banerjee, Richard Bradley, Susan Braudy, Jay Carney, Andy Court, Joshua Civin, Richard Conniff, Ruth Conniff, Elisha Cooper, Susan Dominus, David Greenberg, Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, Laura Pappano, Jennifer Pitts, Julia Preston, Lauren Rabin, Eric Rutkow, David Slifka, John Swansburg, Anya Kamenetz, Steven Weisman, Daniel Yergin friends Nicole Allan, Margaret Bauer, Mark Badger and Laura Heymann, Susan Braudy, Julia Calagiovanni, Elisha Cooper, Haley Cohen, Peter Cooper, Andy Court, The Elizabethan Club, David Freeman and Judith Gingold, Paul Haigney and Tracey Roberts, Bob Lamm, James Liberman, Alka Mansukhani, Benjamin Mueller, Sophia Nguyen, Valerie Nierenberg, Morris Panner, Jennifer Pitts, R. Anthony Reese, Eric Rutkow, Lainie Rutkow, Laura Saavedra and David Buckley, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Elizabeth Sledge, Caroline Smith, Elizabeth Steig, Aliyya Swaby, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Daphne and David Sydney, Margarita Whiteleather, Blake Townsend Wilson, Daniel Yergin, William Yuen
design editors Julia Hedges Hazal Ă–zgĂźr photo editor Elinor Hills Robbie Short web developer Philippe Chlenski
The New Journal is published five times during the academic year by The New Journal at Yale, Inc., P.O. Box 203432 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520. All contents Copyright 2018 by The New Journal at Yale, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction either in whole or in part without written permission of the publisher and editors-in-chief is prohibited. The New Journal is a student-run publication at Yale University. While this magazine is published by Yale College students, Yale University is not responsible for its contents. The Yale University name and trademark is owned and used by permission of the University. Two thousand five hundred copies of each issue are distributed free to members of the Yale and New Haven communities. The New Journal is printed by Turley Publications, Palmer, MA; bookkeeping and billing services are provided by Colman Bookkeeping of New Haven. The New Journal encourages letters to the editor and comments on Yale and New Haven issues. Write to Editorials, 203432 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520. All letters for publication must include address and signature. We reserve the right to edit all letters for publication.
THE NEW J O U R N AL volume 50 issue 4 feb 2018
SINCE 1967 www.TheNewJournalAtYale.com
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cover BUT IT’S YOU Do our sex offender laws actually make communities safer? Rachel Calnek-Sugin
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feature THE CITY BUILDER Herbert Newman wants to heal the scars of urban renewal. Does everyone have a place in his vision? Robert Scaramuccia
standards 4
points of departure BEYOND BINARY — Matthew Kleiner REMEMBERANCE DEFERRED — Yonatan Greenberg REFRAMING THE CANVAS — Sohum Pal
10 snapshot CHECKED OUT — Antonia Ayres-Brown In Connecticut, hotels are hubs for human trafficking, but most employees aren’t prepared to handle it. 15 profile CURATING A LEGACY — Ben Levin For two decades, Jock Reynolds has led the YUAG by the force of his personality. 27 poem FROM A DARK HOUSE — Dimitri Diagne 37 endnote MANE MAN — William Reid
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BEYOND BINARY Yale researchers compete for the future of quantum computing Matthew Kleiner
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here are twelve half-a-million dollar refrigerators on the fourth floor of Yale’s Becton Center for Engineering and Applied Science. Cooled by liquid helium, they maintain a temperature of less than a hundredth of a degree Celsius above absolute zero. The refrigerators, which resemble industrial pipes, hiss in unison like a den of snakes. Inside each is a tangle of cords, wires, tubes, and copper plates inscribed with handwritten alphanumeric symbols: a primitive quantum computer. Scientists and investors envision quantum computing as a technology exponentially more powerful than today’s classical computing. The speed and power of quantum computation has the potential to revolutionize the world of fast finance, create an unbreakable system of encryption, and model otherwise unpredictable atomic behaviors crucial to the development of chemicals and drugs. Recently, several major Silicon Valley firms have joined a growing number of academic groups in the race to create a working, marketable quantum computer. Quantum Circuits, Inc., a New Haven-based startup partnered with the Yale Quantum Institute, is considered a top contender to reach that goal, out of a field that includes IBM, Microsoft, and Google. In January, I went to visit Luigi Frunzio, a senior member of Yale’s quantum computing department, who had offered to show me around. Frunzio has a bushy grey beard and a broad smile. He joined Yale’s team in 2003, during the lab’s infancy under the direction of professors Michel Devoret and Robert Schoelkopf. “It started at the beginning with each of them having one post-doc and a couple of PhD students,” Frunzio told me in his office. “Now each of them has five post-docs and twelve or thirteen graduate students.” What makes quantum computers so much more powerful than classical computers is, most basically, a difference in their fundamental hardware. Classical computers store information on ‘bits’ that have a choice between two states: one or zero, on or off. In a quantum computer, on the other hand, two elementary units—called ‘qubits’—are able to “communicate” with each other through the quantum phenomena of superposition and entanglement. Each qubit can be in two
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illustration julia hedges
states at once, and together they can be in four. Adding more qubits increases the computer’s processing potential exponentially. One of the tasks originally imagined for a quantum computer would be to break enormous numbers into prime factors in a matter of seconds. These problems can take today’s computers days or months to solve, and form the basis of modern file encryption and secure communications—Yale’s quantum computing lab is, in fact, almost entirely funded by federal defense agencies, including IARPA, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity. While it threatens to render current encryption methods obsolete, however, quantum technology also comes with its own, far more secure, form of encryption. Based on Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle—an axiom of quantum mechanics that states that it is impossible to measure a particle’s position without changing its momentum—quantum cryptography would protect communications from being intercepted. Since eavesdroppers cannot measure the characteristics of a quantum system without altering its state, they would be unable to avoid detection. Frunzio explained that there remain many serious challenges to building a functional quantum computer, and even more to producing it on a commercial scale. For example, the qubits’ communications are only stable at incredibly low temperatures; hence the $500,000 refrigerators. “That already makes it a tool that my mom will never want to buy,” he said. He hopes, though, that the quantum world will eventually be downloaded to the “cloud” and available to everyone. IBM already put a simple five-qubit computer “online” a little over a year ago, and is planning to offer a sixteen-qubit version soon (though for a fee). Frunzio points out that, with so few qubits, the current online quantum computers are only really useful for abstruse calculations foreign to most people’s everyday life. But he imagines a not-so-distant future, in which users could be connected, for example, to “a video game on a quantum computer going so fast that it becomes like real life.”
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n 2015, Frunzio, Schoelkopf, and Devoret spun off Quantum Circuits, backed by venture capital firms, with the goal of commercializing their research. The startup occupies an office on the second floor of 25 Science Park, a fivestory concrete and glass cube at the edge of Dixwell, beyond Pauli Murray College. Yale owns the building and rents spaces to private companies; down the hall from QCI are Kleo Pharmaceuticals’ headquarters and a PepsiCo chemical lab. For now, QCI is entirely housed in one long room, the windowed side partitioned into office cubicles. QCI is closely linked to the Yale quantum computing lab. THE NEW JOURN AL
All four of its employees are either graduates of Yale’s quantum physics doctorate program or worked there as postdocs, and, through a legal agreement with the university, the startup has exclusive rights to the Yale lab’s patents. However, all the researchers I met, both at Yale and at QCI, emphasized that the two projects have significantly different goals. Yvonne Gao, a graduate student studying with Professor Schoelkopf, explained that while the Yale academic efforts are focused on “the proof of principle experiments, demonstrating that certain principles of quantum mechanics could be realized in a laboratory experiment, QCI will have a very different emphasis, because for them it’s really about commercialization, the reproducibility of a certain type of device.” QCI has already been successfully marketing one gadget for over a year: a quantum amplifier. “The amplifier is the read-out of the computer; it’s the way that you can read the qubits,” is how Frunzio described its function. Katrina Sliwa, who completed her Ph.D. under the direction of Professor Devoret in May 2016 and was hired that same month as QCI’s first employee, is an expert in quantum amplifiers. She explained that “to go from a proof-of-concept device to a product, you have to worry about how reproducible you can make these things, how reliable you can make these things, and then there are small changes to the design that can be made to make them more user-friendly.” Professor Devoret helped to found QCI, but he recently left the company, feeling that tailoring quantum computing research to the market limits the scope of possible findings. Devoret, who is French, wears thick-framed glasses and speaks slowly and softly. “It’s not by perfecting candles that you discover electricity,” he told me in his office. “The industries only want to fund incremental research. They don’t want to fund wide research that looks far ahead in the future, they just want to make better products.” He prefers the way government grants are issued to Yale’s lab, less earmarked for specific projects and more designated for general exploration of the subject. “The great scientific discoveries have always been funded by governments. [The Yale lab’s money] is coming from the American taxpayer. And I think it’s healthy, I think that’s what the government is for, doing this long-term investment in knowledge.” I asked Frunzio whether the first quantum computer to surpass classical capabilities will come out of Yale. “I don’t think it’s going to come out of the Yale academic effort. Because, you see, why would I ask one of my students to 5FEBRUARY 2018
repeat the same experiment fifty or sixty times?” he said, adding, “But I hope that QCI will be in that race. Will it be the first? We’ll see.” Frunzio is optimistic about QCI’s chances because he feels the competitive advantage in such a cutting-edge field lies primarily with small, focused startups, rather than enormous tech giants. Large companies are interested in staying competitive in relevant consumer markets and will only heavily invest in new domains once they become profitable. “It’s the difference between a mammal and a dinosaur,” Frunzio said. “You know, the dinosaur is big, but just to think to move his tail takes a long time because it’s so big.” The mammal is certainly thinking hard. Its tail hasn’t moved much yet, but if you look closely, you’ll see it beginning to twitch. — Matthew Kleiner is a first-year in Saybrook College.
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REMEMBRANCE DEFERRED Over a century after the Civil War, a Connecticut town works to remember its slaves. Yonatan Greenberg
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uilford, a town of twenty-thousand half an hour north of New Haven, is a place that loves its past. There are three historical societies, and in the town center, by the chocolatier and tea shop, historical markers nearly outnumber street signs. A lone soldier stands at the center of the town green, looming over the dog walkers and families. Tall and imposing, with a musket by his side, he is the centerpiece of an 1877 memorial dedicated to the town’s Civil War veterans. Until recently, there was no such memorial for the town’s slaves, who are buried beneath him. In Connecticut, slavery dates back to the mid-1600s, and though it’s hard to know when it reached Guilford, by the late 1700s there were around fifty slaves living there. For all that Guilford loves to remember, until not long ago, their slaves had been forgotten. A few years ago, frustrated that the textbooks he used almost never mentioned Northern slavery, Dennis Culliton, a history teacher at Adams Middle School in Guilford, set out to unearth the stories of the town’s slaves. He dug through court documents, wills, and property archives, and eventually found records of over seventy slaves who had lived there. Two years ago, Culliton presented his findings to a local historical society. Afterwards, fellow resident Doug Nygren approached him with the idea of memorializing the slaves’ lives in stone. Nygren was inspired by a recent trip to Germany, where he had encountered a project by the artist Gunter Demnig that placed small memorials called stolpersteine (“stumbling stones”) outside the final residences of Jewish victims of the Holocaust. The project began in 1992 and has since grown beyond the bounds of Germany, with fifty-six thou 6
sand stolpersteine installed in twenty-two European countries. Last year, Culliton, Nygren, and a few other Guilford residents founded the Witness Stones Project, which plans to install memorial stones each year and organize educational events to remind residents of the enslaved men and women who lived, labored, and died in their town. Now, three “stones” are scattered across the streets of Guilford, placed on the sites of three slaves’ homes––one outside the town hall, one outside the local bank, and one outside a historic house. The small brass squares fit smoothly into the brick sidewalk, shining faintly in daylight, hardly visible by night. The project also enlisted the help of local eighth graders, who dedicated a month of their history curriculum this year to studying Culliton’s findings. Following a general unit on slavery, they then wrote biographies of Guilford’s slaves, almost all of whom had never been written about before. Guilford has about three-hundred eighth graders, and if the project continues, a new crop of students will continue the project each year. At the installation ceremony for the first three stones this past November, eighth grader Theo Freeman read the biography he wrote about Candace, a slave who lived in Guilford in the late 1700s and worked as a baker. “Candace found a way to be her own person, even as a slave,” Theo said, speaking to the crowd of parents, students, and residents gathered on the Guilford Green. “She also wrote her own will, which most slaves didn’t do. Some people may think this is impossible, but she did it.” One of the project’s aims is to show Guilford’s residents, THE NEW JOURN AL
ninety-six percent of whom are white, that enslaved African Americans are an integral part of the town’s history. Kristine Iglesias, a lifelong Guilford resident and founding member of Witness Stones, grew up thinking that she and her family were among the town’s first Black residents. “I’m glad my parents chose Guilford,” she said at the installation ceremony. “And while I’m not blind to the prejudices that still exist here, I am fiercely loyal to this town.” As Iglesias was growing up, fellow residents sometimes assumed that she was an underprivileged girl from New Haven, or that she was related to her principal, who was also Black. Like most people in Guilford, she only recently learned through Culliton that slaves had once lived there, and the discovery has deepened her connection to the town. “There’s no such thing as good slavery, but there are stories of people who had lives, communities, families to come home to,” Iglesias said. “There’s a sadness to it, but it’s also empowering, to me and my kids as well, knowing that Black people helped make this town what it is.” Hazel Carby, a Witness Stones board member and professor of African American Studies at Yale, wants to expand the project’s scope within Guilford. On February 21, she will lead a book club discussion at the Guilford
Free Library about Kindred by Octavia Butler, a novel that oscillates between a plantation in antebellum Maryland and 1976 California. After that, she’s considering Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “The Case for Reparations.” Carby, who thinks the United States is segregated enough to be considered an apartheid state, hopes the project will push Guilford residents to realize that the difference between slavery and contemporary society is smaller than they think. One evening, as the sun started to set over the green, a mom walked by one of the Guilford Witness stones with her child. In the fading light, the coaster-sized brass was hard to see, but the girl, perhaps one of Culliton’s eighth graders, pulled her mom to a stop and pointed at the stone insistently. “Moses: Enslaved Here: 1762-1812,” it read. The mom smiled at her daughter, looked down at the stone for a few moments, then picked her head back up, ready to keep walking. The girl stayed in place, still staring at the stone, not yet ready to leave.
— Yonatan Greenberg is a first-year in Saybrook College.
illustration fiona drenttel
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REFRAMING THE CANVAS The Yale Center for British Art helps visitors engage critically with its collection Sohum Pal
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ebra, a 1763 painting by George Stubbs, serves as the mascot of the Yale Center for British Art on shirts, mugs, and bumper stickers. But to Linda Friedlaender, Senior Curator of Education, the Stubbs painting also embodies the YCBA’s recent shift toward a more critical perspective. “Before, we would talk about the story of how Queen Charlotte received the zebra from explorers in Africa, and what a gifted painter Stubbs was, and we’d talk about the painterly qualities of the work,” she explained. “But really, the zebra functions as a symbol of the imperial project of Britain, and hearing that [from one of the graduate students] gave me the chance to step back and consider all the paintings [in the collection] from that lens.” In a seminar room off the museum’s lobby, Friedlander, who has worked at the YCBA since its opening in 1977, passes around copies of a news article to twenty-one undergraduates. These are the YCBA Student Guides, a group of students selected to design tours and lead the public through the Center’s three-story collection. The article is about Therese Dreaming, a painting that depicts an adolescent girl with legs spread apart and underwear revealed, housed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “There’s a petition going around to either remove or further contextualize this painting by Balthus,” she says, holding up a print-out of the painting. “So what do you do? Let’s start there.” That question—critical and topical—is typical of the discussions at weekly Student Guide classes. The YCBA’s primary benefactor, Paul Mellon, envisioned the Center as a repository of “beautiful works of art for Yale students” when he presented his collection to the University in 1966. But as the analytical stance on “Britishness” has shifted focus toward the country’s imperial legacy, the Center has begun to rethink its engagement with the term. As part of that process, the YCBA’s Education Department has altered the Student Guide program to reflect a newly critical attitude toward Britain’s representation, both in the artwork and in the world at large. On a recent January afternoon, Curator of Education and Academic Outreach Jennifer Reynolds-Kaye began another class with a presentation on “The British Afterlives of Pre-Columbian Art.” Framing the art of the pre-colonial Americas through a British lens is unorthodox, but for Reynolds-Kaye, that’s the point. The usual confines of the imagined British empire don’t cut it here—British imperialism cleaves a wide fissure through world history,
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and, under the tutelage of the Education Department, the Guides are learning how to tell museum visitors about it.
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he museum’s critical shift, Friedlaender thinks, was spurred by the wave of political activism that rocked American college campuses, including Yale, in 2015. Likening it to the current #MeToo movement, Friedlaender believes that “2015 was a time when students of color at Yale and around the country started breaking the silence around [colleges’] treatment of minority students.” Shortly thereafter, in early 2016, the YCBA closed to the public for extended building conservation. The closure period provided the staff with an opportunity to reevaluate the museum’s mission and vision with respect to the concerns raised by the protests. In particular, the YCBA began to consider ways in which its collection could serve as a means of engaging with the legacies of slavery and imperialism, not only for students, but for members of the New Haven community. Friedlaender said that programming involving New Haven residents, local schools, and professionals from other museums has transformed the timbre of the YCBA and diversified the demographics of the museum’s visitors. With these new goals in mind, the museum reorganized its permanent collection for its 2016 reopening under the dictum “Britain in the World.” “It’s no longer just about THE NAL THENEW NEWJOUR JOURN AL
British culture and history, stuck on a small island sandwiched between the Atlantic Ocean and the North Sea,” said Student Guide Jordan Schmolka, who has been in the program since 2016. “The YCBA is in the process of looking outward, redefining its mission and using its collection to address how Britain’s history has affected those beyond its borders.” To prompt this kind of thinking in the museum’s visitors, Schmolka and other Guides discuss why figures are depicted in certain positions or with particular lighting effects and how power is asserted through a work’s composition.
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he art can be jarring, Friedlaender pointed out while describing a prominent eighteenth-century portrait of Elihu Yale. He sits at the center of the canvas, surrounded by other prominent men. At the right bottom corner, a Black slave waits, looking at his master. “That Black servant in the corner—he’s finely dressed, but there’s a collar and a padlock around his neck,” she observes. “He would have been locked up at night.” Focusing on formal details—like the appearance of the padlock as a representation of chattel bondage—helps students consider imperialism, slavery, and race, while “show[ing] how Britain’s imperialist history pervades absolutely everything in the museum,” Schmolka says. Her own tour, “Paint It Black: A History of the Color,” focuses on the history of black pigmentation in the collection, and discusses the ways Blackness has been constructed in lockstep with racial alterity. While Schmolka and Friedlaender agree that the collection serves as a nexus for engaging with imperial legacy, they also emphasize the complementary relevance of recent programming. Schmolka and Sonia Gadre, another
Student Guide, noted the “Things of Beauty Growing” exhibition that closed last December, which explored how vessel traditions from the British Isles, China, and Korea came together in novel ways to birth contemporary British pottery. Students have been crucial in transforming the museum’s approach to race and representation. Since 2014, the Guides have had a hand in shaping the YCBA’s collection by selecting a work on paper for acquisition through the John O’Brien Fund each year. Both initiatives are shifting attention from the dazzling metropolitan centers of the former British Empire to the margins, with an emphasis on the traces of colonial rule. To Gadre, the Student Guides are challenging the notion that the YCBA is antiquated and pretentious. “We are young and we are here to help you through the museum’s resources,” she said. “That in itself seems to turn the stereotype of stuffy old British art on its head.”
— Sohum Pal is a sophomore in Branford College.
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SNAPSHOT
CHECKED OUT In Connecticut, hotels are hubs for human trafficking, but most employees aren’t prepared to handle it. Antonia Ayres-Brown
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hen Neil Hughes works the front reception desk at the Mayflower Motel in Milford, Connecticut, he always stays alert. Nestled between car service stations in a retail area just off Interstate 95, the motel where he has been employed for the past eight years doesn’t look particularly vulnerable to crime: a table in the front office is scattered with cheap romance novels that visitors are invited to borrow; one wall is decorated with a playful plaque that reads, “I work 40 hours a week to be this poor”; guests stream in and out of the office to check in, chat with one another, and buy snacks. But Hughes, who lives on the premises, doesn’t let the familiarity of the space blind him to the threat currently afflicting Connecticut hotels and motels: human trafficking. Behind the counter where Hughes works, the Mayflower Motel’s management team has hung several informational posters about how to identify and respond to signs of trafficking. Some of the clues are conspicuous, such as a woman with visible bruises, or a guest aggressively refusing to let his companion speak. But others, Hughes noted, are less obvious: a young girl checking in with a much older man, or even
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a feeling in his gut. “If something doesn’t look right, it usually isn’t,” he said, stuffing his hands in his pocket with a sense of proud authority. Hughes hasn’t observed any signs of trafficking at the Mayflower recently, but in the event that he ever does, he knows to call the authorities. Hughes’s vigilance and preparedness reflect a recent statewide push to raise awareness about human trafficking in the lodging sector—a movement that the Connecticut state legislature most recently advanced with Public Act No. 16-71. The bill, which became law in 2016, was enacted in response to the more than 650 underage victims of trafficking referred to the Connecticut Department of Children and Families since 2008. Before Public Act No. 16-71 was instituted, Connecticut prosecutors had not succeeded in convicting a single perpetrator since trafficking was made a felony in 2006. Its measures include a new requirement that hotels and motels keep records of all guests and receipts for at least six months following each transaction, as well as an unfunded mandate that all lodging employees receive human trafficking awareness training before October 1, 2017.
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Today, the bill’s success remains largely uncertain. On the one hand, the preparedness of employees like Neil Hughes suggests that it has worked. The Human Trafficking Prevention Project, an initiative run by Quinnipiac Law School students, has trained an estimated 350 hotel and motel employees across the state. Yet disagreements concerning the legislation’s technical stipulations persist, a majority of lodging employees remain untrained, and anti-trafficking advocates are tasked with enforcing a bill that has no financial carrot or legal stick. Now, several months after the supposed October 1 deadline for training completion, critics and proponents of the bill are grappling with the same question: if Public Act No. 16-71 isn’t self-enforcing, how can service-providers and prosecutors make it effective?
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n general, people still believe trafficking happens someplace else. It’s something in the movies,” said Tammy Sneed, Director of Adolescent Services at the Connecticut Department of Children and Families. This “not in my state” attitude, she believes, is why so many residents are surprised to learn that hundreds of local minors are trafficked in Connecticut each year. Sneed is also the director of the Human Anti-Trafficking Response Team (HART), a statewide collaboration between individuals from diverse professional backgrounds—law enforcement, mental health providers, anti-trafficking advocates, and more. The HART 11 FEBRUARY 2018 team’s primary purpose is to identify and provide support services to survivors of trafficking and youth at risk of exploita-
tion. There are seventeen HART liaisons throughout the state, each responsible for covering a different geographic region and connecting local youth with necessary services. In 2014, HART received ninety-four unique referrals of minors who were either confirmed survivors of trafficking or suspected of being trafficked. The next year, the program received 133 referrals. In 2016, the most recent year for which HART has complete data, the program received 202 referrals. Despite this concerning trend, Sneed said it’s often difficult for Connecticut residents to recognize the threat and impact of the trafficking industry because so much of its business is conducted in a nearly invisible arena: the web. “Many of our kids are being recruited via the internet,” Sneed said. “So they’re often being groomed by the internet, and often… they’re being sold by the internet.” Victims are typically first targeted on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Grindr, where traffickers can cultivate close friendships with dozens of underage children simultaneously. Sneed noted that people tend to assume children in urban areas are at the highest risk of being trafficked, but HART has encountered several rural cases in which minors were trafficked despite living several miles from their closest neighbors. Once traffickers gain the trust of these children, their industry of exploitation thrives on internet platforms like 11 THE NEW JOUR NAL Backpage and Craigslist, websites that allow users to post free classified advertisements. Since 2010, Backpage has repeat-
edly come under fire for knowingly tolerating advertisements for the sexual exploitation of minors. In 2017, Backpage removed the “Adult Services” section of their website and cracked down on illicit language, but traffickers continue to advertise minors using misspellings and widely-understood code words. “New in town,” one anti-trafficking advocate explained, universally means that the advertised individual is underage. Other posts advertise “yung” girls in order to avoid the website’s filter on the word “young.” Roughly half of the youth who are trafficked in Connecticut are already in the Department of Children and Families system at the time of their trafficking. In addition to hailing from a range of communities—urban, suburban, and rural— these vulnerable minors also cross racial demographics and family backgrounds. In 2016, 37 percent of HART’s clients were white, 28 percent were Black, and 24 percent were Latinx. A reported 58 percent of these minors resided with their parents at the time of their exploitation, but 16 percent were runaways and 11 percent were living in foster care. Gender is the one constant across most of Sneed’s clients: although HART cares for survivors of all genders, more than 91 percent of those served in 2016 were women. In 2004, the Connecticut legislature created the Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Council to examine the issue of trafficking in the state and make policy recommendations. Jillian Gilchrest, the Director of Health Professional Outreach at the Connecticut Coalition Against Domestic Violence, chairs the council, whose twenty-five members come from both the public and private sectors. The TIP Council’s research indicates that the trafficking industry (both sexual and labor) thrives in Connecticut because of the state’s close proximity to both New York City and Boston. Travel is cheap in Connecticut, and traffickers can constantly move along the Interstate 95 corridor to evade police detection. Food and lodging prices are typically lower than in the neighboring two major cities, and the demand for underage sex work is high. “What people aren’t understanding is that, no, no, there is an industry for selling youth,” Gilchrest said. In other words, working in Connecticut is a good business move for traffickers.
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ith the help of the TIP Council, the Connecticut Joint Committee on Judiciary introduced a new in-state anti-trafficking bill—which would later evolve into Public Act No. 16-71—in the spring of 2016. The proposed legislation included a number of provisions designed to regulate lodging properties’ role in human trafficking, including the six month policy governing record keeping and the mandate concerning employee awareness training. If lodging property owners failed to train their employees by October 1, 2017, they would be guilty of a Class A misdemeanor. Finally, hotels and motels would be banned from offering hourly rates for room rentals. But by the time Governor Dannel Malloy signed the new bill, Public Act No. 16-71, into law on June 1, 2016, congressmen had 12
By the time Governor Dannel Malloy signed the new bill, congressmen had removed most of the legislation’s teeth. removed most of the legislation’s teeth. The Connecticut lodging industry strongly opposed the stipulations outlined by the original bill. For a public hearing in March 2016, the president of the Connecticut Lodging Association, Victor Antico, wrote a letter urging lawmakers to consider an alternative “strong anti-human trafficking campaign that focuses on the nature of the issue not the regulation of an industry used in the process.” Two days later, the Judiciary Committee filed a substitute bill that omitted the ban on hourly rentals. The final legislation also failed to allocate funding for the trafficking awareness training requirement. Legislators successfully defended Section 5, which required that lodging owners “ensure that each employee of such hotel, motel, inn or similar lodging receive training at the time of hire on the (1) recognition of potential victims of human trafficking, and (2) activities commonly associated with human trafficking.” By October 1, 2017, hotel and motels owners would theoretically need to certify that all employees received this training. However, without funds, the training initiative had no monetary support to incentivize hotel and motel staff to attend training sessions, or to compensate the instructors of these trainings. Lastly, Public Act No. 16-71 included no explicit methods for ensuring that lodging property owners would be held accountable to the bill. No government body was created or assigned to verify that all properties complied with the bill by the 2017 deadline. Throughout the legislative process, even the section designating failure to train employees as a class A misdemeanor was cut—meaning the final draft of the bill articulated no punishment for non-compliance. In January 2017, Governor Malloy announced a public-private partnership between several bodies, including the Connecticut Department of Children and Families (DCF), the Connecticut Lodging Association, Marriott International, Quinnipiac Law School, and Grace Farms Foundation, a THE NEW JOURN AL
non-profit organization in New Canaan that contributed to the development of Public Act No. 16-71. With the help of anti-trafficking organizations Polaris Project and EPCAT, an international network that began as the campaign to End Child Prostitution in Asian Tourism, Marriott International developed a hotel employee training program on human trafficking in 2011. Quinnipiac Law School professor Sheila Hayre had mostly worked against labor trafficking before she got involved, but she stepped up to ensure that the Connecticut hotel and motel trainings were run effectively. Since then, Hayre and her team of over thirty Quinnipiac student volunteers have become the vehicle for these trainings. Hayre estimates that since last January, they’ve organized ten sessions for hotel employees across the state of Connecticut. The Quinnipiac Human Trafficking Prevention Project workshops follow the Marriott curriculum, but the law students attempt to incorporate local examples when they can. (They typically have to explain, for example, why hotels and motels along Connecticut’s I-95 corridor are so prone to becoming sites of trafficking.) Additionally, the student organizers gather a panel of four or five experts—from law enforcement, the DCF, or anti-trafficking organizations—to answer hotel and motel employees’ questions at the end of each training session. Since beginning their workshops, the Quinnipiac team has found it most effective to reach out to hotels and motels and deliver the trafficking awareness trainings on site. This
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approach has had success thus far, but Hayre is unsure if they will ever be able to train every lodging worker in the state with this approach. “Honestly, I don’t think we’ve even touched the tip of the iceberg,” she said. Sarah Washburn, an employee of the Connecticut Lodging Association and the association’s representative on the Connecticut TIP Council, echoed Hayre. “The general reaction has been challenging,” Washburn said. “The effort to get the training done by that date [October 1, 2017] has been hard for the industry.” When listing lodging properties’ training options in an interview, Washburn noted that many owners ask their employees to simply read and sign informational materials. Others, she said, can send a representative to one of the Quinnipiac workshops and then have that representative review the curriculum with other employees when they return. Sheila Hayre, however, believes Public Act No. 16-71 forbids businesses from sending a representative who will subsequently train other staff members—and she expressed concern that this misunderstanding could actually have dangerous consequences. “It’s kind of horrifying that people are thinking, ‘We can send a rep and have that happen,’” Hayre said. “Trafficking is an elusive, very difficult-to-define topic, so we do not want folks who are not well-versed around trafficking issues to be dealing with this.”
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“While you want to engage in vigilante justice, and you really want to help these folks, you can actually endanger them.”
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n 2011, Shelia Fredrick, a flight attendant for Alaska Airlines, noticed something off about a girl in a window seat. The teenager had a bruise on her leg, was traveling with a much older man, and looked distressed. Fredrick knew something wasn’t right. She decided to intervene. While the man was looking away, Fredrick caught the girl’s attention and mouthed to go to the bathroom, where she had left paper and a pen. When Fredrick later checked the bathroom, she found a note: “I need help.” The flight attendant immediately alerted the captain, and law enforcement officials arrived at the airport before the flight landed. A BuzzFeed article about Fredrick’s intervention went viral in 2017, with thousands of people applauding the flight attendant for her quick thinking. But Sheila Hayre sometimes tells this story in trafficking awareness trainings as an example of exactly what not to do. “We actually point out that that’s extremely dangerous— both to yourself, the people around you, the people you work with, but also to the victim,” Hayre said. “While you want to engage in vigilante justice, and you really want to help these folks, you can actually endanger them.” If the adult male trafficker had found Fredrick’s note, Hayre explained, he could have reacted violently. Furthermore, many victims of sexual trafficking, at the time of their exploitation, do not see themselves as victims and instead think of their traffickers as their boyfriends. But while the Quinnipiac Law School trainings discourage workers from pursuing vigilante justice, they still discuss myriad examples of what hotel and motel workers should recognize as signs of trafficking. Then, they say, the most appropriate response is to let law enforcement handle it. “What I tell folks to pay attention to is the dynamics between the adult and the minor, or sometimes what they think is a young adult. Does the situation seem to be very controlling? Is the adult doing all the talking? Are they attempting to secure a hotel room with cash [and] without identification?” said Tammy Sneed, who has served as an expert panelist. The trainings also emphasize that trafficking awareness must be a collaborative effort between staff members in different roles. “When you’re cleaning staff, and you’re going into a hotel room, and you’re supposedly renting to a father
and his two daughters, and you see sex toys or you see lubricant all over the place, that to me is a huge red flag,” Sneed said. “If you’re working at the front desk, and you have a room that keeps renting pornography, and again you’re supposed to have a family staying in a particular room, that would be a concern.” Many hotel and motel employees are afraid of reporting a client and being incorrect, but communicating with other employees about their observations often empowers them to call the authorities. And reporting a potential instance of trafficking in Connecticut is as easy as that—just placing a phone call. This procedure ensures law enforcement is involved early on, and deters unqualified “vigilantes” from intervening counterproductively. Once lodging employees call the Connecticut trafficking tip line or local police, their responsibilities are supposedly fulfilled. “You need to err on the side of caution. Because mistakes will be made, but the trick is, they don’t have to be made by you. Your job is to report,” Hayre said. Hotel and motel employees have been receptive at the trafficking awareness trainings thus far, and many have been shocked by how pertinent the issue of trafficking is in Connecticut. After hearing about sexual trafficking on Backpage, one property owner visited the website to see for himself. He was devastated to find an advertisement that featured a photo of an underage girl being trafficked in his own hotel. The trafficker had already vacated the room by this point, but the property owner’s sense of immunity was shattered. He swore to be more vigilant in the future. Despite these moments of success, anti-trafficking advocates are still weighing how to bring about widespread enforcement of Public Act No. 16-71. Because the bill’s training initiative has no funding—and there have been no legal consequences for properties that did not finish training by October 1, 2017—many advocates are shifting toward moral arguments. If most hotels now boast about being eco-friendly, why can’t they create a culture in which hotels also want to be openly anti-trafficking? Sheila Hayre thinks this may be an effective strategy in Connecticut, but she is not hopeful about the replicability of the training mandate in other states. “In larger states…I just can’t imagine how they’d be able to do this without funding. Already it’s quite difficult to do it with all the traveling, and [Connecticut is] quite a small state.” Tammy Sneed recognizes Public Act No. 16-71’s lack of teeth, but the HART team is dedicated to making the bill work, even if progress is slower than expected. “In a perfect world, we would have some money to make it easier to implement,” she said. “But we can’t just be dependent on that, because the reality is money’s not out there. And the criminals are out there making money.”
— Antonia Ayres-Brown is a junior in Branford College.
PROFILES
CURATING A LEGACY For two decades, Jock Reynolds has led the YUAG by the force of his personality
Ben Levin
photos elinor hills
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n expansive circle composed of intersecting lines levitates on a wall in the lobby of the Yale University Art Gallery. Close up, specks of white emerge from blackness like stars in a compacted night sky. Jock Reynolds will explain to anyone who walks into the Gallery that this wall drawing by Sol Lewitt includes ten-thousand straight black lines and ten-thousand not-straight black lines. Reynolds, who was a longtime friend of LeWitt’s, told me that each of LeWitt’s drawings comes with a “certificate” that “is a little bit like a musical score,” conducting the artists who execute the piece. Last December, the final not-straight lines were drawn by visitors invited to participate in the culmination of the installation. On a January afternoon, Reynolds, the director of the museum, walks through its galleries with a swift, easy gait. He calls out animated greetings to passing curators and the security guards standing watch in the corners of the rooms. 15
At seventy, he is tall and broad, with neatly trimmed white hair and a big, flushed face. Speaking quickly and fervently, he packs his sentences with fine detail, diving into a narration of his time at the Gallery before I can ask him a question. He moves excitedly from room to room, his warmth is accompanied by a sense of ownership: this three-building museum complex on Chapel Street is his masterpiece. This spring, after two decades of leadership, Reynolds will step down as the director of the Gallery. Over the course of his tenure, he has led the museum’s transformation from a neglected institution with scattered holdings to a world-class collection of art displayed in elegantly renovated galleries. Under his tenure, the museum has added new departments, significantly increased its visitation, and solidified its status as a leading teaching museum. Today, the Gallery has 160 students involved in educational programs—as many as it has full-time employees. Reynolds THE NEW JOUR NAL
has led the Gallery with a blend of personal warmth and a firm belief in its cause, proselytizing on the power of the Gallery’s art and the importance of its educational mission. Beginning in the early two-thousands, administrators asked students to put on programming and help configure rooms. “Students didn’t give us a bad suggestion, ever,” Reynolds told me. Students began co-curating exhibitions and recommended that the Gallery have a homey lobby space, which explains the curvy green chairs and spongy grey couches. Reynolds hopes that close engagement with students will teach them to think visually and innovatively. “You want to pass on your knowledge to younger people,” he said, so that they can “outdo you in every respect.” Pausing in the main lobby of the Gallery, Reynolds reflects on the acuity of the architectural juxtaposition of LeWitt’s paintings and Louis Kahn’s windows. His voice lifts with raw zeal as he turns to me. “You’re here now. This museum is here with an incredible collection. And it’s yours! It’s here for you all!” His face is earnest and insistent, and for the moment I am totally sold, my skin prickling from the force of his democratic proclamation.
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eynolds grew up in Davis, California, where his mother was a botanist and his father was a microbiologist teaching at the University of California, Davis. He always liked making things: he remembers building cages and hen houses as a child, and had a miniature tool bench next to his dad’s. As a teenager at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, he began to learn about art, studying the Josef Albers-Bauhaus school and frequently retreating to the Addison Gallery, Andover’s American art museum, to do his classwork. In between assignments, he enjoyed getting lost in famous American paintings. But it wasn’t until he joined the inaugural class of UC Santa Cruz that Reynolds began developing his own artistic practice. As a senior influenced by visiting artists from the experimental Fluxus school, his work included a toothbrush with real teeth for bristles. After graduation, he enrolled in the MFA program at the UC Davis. There, his artwork explored biological life cycles, and he crafted process-oriented, ephemeral work using plants he grew on a small farm. In 1973, fresh out of graduate school, Reynolds joined the faculty of San Francisco State University. Over the next decade, he directed the University’s Center for Experimental and Interdisciplinary Art and delved into theatre, designing sets for plays and dance performances. The nineteen-seventies, Reynolds says, was “a very yeasty and creative decade,” and living in California, he soon found himself in the thick of it all. He met Suzanne Hellmuth, a dancer, choreographer, and performance artist from Oberlin, while designing a set for a show she was involved with. The young couple married in 1977, after helping found 80 Langton Street, an alternative arts space in a defunct casket factory in San Francisco. The arts scene there was still small enough that most people knew each
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other, and the theatre, music and visual arts communities melded together. With institutional support hard to come by, the young artists worked day jobs—anything from teaching to carpentry—and collaborated in their studios, sharing space, resources, and ideas. Their scrimping soon paid off: by the late nineteen-seventies, Reynolds’ and Hellmuth’s work was being shown in galleries on the East Coast and in Europe.
EVEN TODAY, THE TERM “JOCKISM” IS PLAYFULLY USED TO REFER TO THE ACT OF ONBOARDING SOMEONE BEFORE THEY QUITE KNOW WHAT THEY ARE GETTING THEMSELVES INTO. In the early nineteen-eighties, Reynolds entered museum administration as director of the Washington Project for the Arts, an alternative art space in D.C. Richard J. Powell, who was the WPA’s director of programs during Reynolds’s last years there and now teaches art and art history at Duke University, says that at the WPA, Reynolds fostered a “collaborative, intellectually stimulating, and fun environment.” After six years in Washington, Reynolds was recruited to return to the museum he had loved as a teenager, this time as its director. Over the next decade running Andover’s Addison Gallery, Reynolds oversaw what he later called a “mini version” of the expansion he would lead at Yale. Under Reynolds’s leadership, the Addison Gallery’s annual visitation numbers jumped from ten thousand to around sixty-five thousand, the collection and endowment grew, and community outreach programming expanded. Reynolds gained practice fundraising from a wealthy alumni pool, bringing in new art, and coordinating extensive outreach programs—all tasks he would scale up and master at Yale. Allison Kemmerer, a curatorial assistant at the Addison during Reynolds’ time, describes Reynolds as someone who routinely thinks big, and with so much enthusiasm that his ambitious plans actually become possible. Sometimes, this meant persuading colleagues to embark on projects they weren’t entirely sure of. Even today, in the offices of the Addison, the term “Jockism” is playfully used to refer to the act of onboarding someone before they quite know what they are getting themselves into. By the mid-nineteen-nineties, former University President Richard Levin began lobbying Reynolds to come to Yale. Since 1995, Levin had been putting together a master plan to renovate the art gallery. One of the Gallery’s buildings was partially roofless, and Levin hoped to renovate and THE NEW JOUR NAL
expand its facilities. He had heard about Reynolds’ work at the Addison; Reynolds remembers Levin telling him, “This is what we need in New Haven—come on down!” Reynolds already had some friends at Yale, including then-Dean of Yale College Dick Brodhead, who had been a year ahead of Reynolds at Andover, when he signed on as Director in 1998. Between 2004 and 2012 all three buildings were renovated, Reynolds proudly reports, “without closing the museum for a single day.” Today, Reynolds takes evident delight in pointing out the high-tech hidden ventilation system in the Chapel Street building, which heats and cools the John Trumbull paintings that formed the Gallery’s founding collection in 1832. Reynolds has also overseen huge expansions in the scope of the Gallery’s permanent collections, helping to create new departments in Photography, African Art, and Indo-Pacific Art. Ruth Barnes, who has been the Curator of Indo-Pacific Art since the department was established in 2010, describes Reynolds as an exceptionally supportive director, albeit one with high expectations. They worked closely together when the department recently decided to accept a large donation of Indonesian puppets, which, Barnes told me, “with one stroke makes the Yale Art Gallery the world’s leading center for Indonesian performance studies.” Barnes also noted that Reynolds expects his curators to work closely with donors and to accommodate their wishes. “He would land like a ton of bricks” on a curator who failed to do so, Barnes said. Although she is frustrated at times by ego-driven donors, Barnes thinks Reynolds’s emphasis on patronage helps the Gallery stay relevant.
NOW, REYNOLDS IS SPEAKING OUT AGAINST CENSORSHIP FROM A DIFFERENT ANGLE. All four exhibitions opening in March pay homage to Reynolds, three of them for his personal relationships with the artists. Pamela Franks was working in Joel Shapiro’s studio in the nineteen-nineties when Reynolds visited the sculptor for an exhibition, and she remembers his attentive interest in the artist and his craft. Reynolds spent hours in Shapiro’s studio and digging through storage to look at old work, beginning a friendship that decades later has brought Shapiro’s work to the Gallery. Now a curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Gallery, Franks is curating “Joel Shapiro: Plaster, Paper, Wood, and Wire,” which builds on the Shapiro exhibition Reynolds originally curated and includes sculptures the artist made in response to that earlier work. Franks values the Gallery’s focus on the 17
primacy of artists, which she says is a key part of Reynolds’s legacy: his emphasis on “the creative impulse, the ideas, and the generative aspect of what artists do.” Besides Shapiro, there will also be exhibitions of wall drawings by Sol LeWitt, sculpture by Reynolds’s beloved grad-school mentor Manuel Neri, and photographs and other art of the ruins of Pompeii.
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eynolds’s commitment to making art available to a broad audience has led him to speak up when political debates have questioned whether controversial artwork should be shown freely. In 1989, towards the end of his time directing the Washington Project for the Arts, Reynolds made a decisive move in a moment of national controversy. Afraid of losing federal funding, the Corcoran Gallery of Contemporary Art in D.C. had backed out of showing a Robert Mapplethorpe retrospective that congressional Republicans were calling “lewd” and “indecent.” Reynolds led the WPA in providing a space for the show. Thirty years later, he still gets fired up about the “culture wars.” “That was the easiest decision,” he told me. Mapplethorpe had died of AIDS earlier that year, and Reynolds still has a bone to pick with the politicians who wanted to censor the artwork for what he viewed as homophobic reasons. Now, Reynolds is speaking out against censorship from a different angle. In late January, when the National Gallery of Art indefinitely postponed a Chuck Close exhibition THE NEW JOUR NAL
following allegations that the artist sexually harassed some of his models, Reynolds weighed in once again. Quoted in The New York Times as the leader of an institution that collects Close’s work, Reynolds argued that the artwork should not be withheld from public view. He reflected that Picasso’s work is freely shown in spite of his deplorable history with women. “If that goes too far,” Reynolds told me, “there’s a lot of stuff that’s going to be taken out of cultural discussion and display,” adding that he thinks things might be getting “a little bit out of control.” But Reynolds, who is a friend of Close’s, encouraged criticism of artists’ behavior and said he thinks it is important to situate their work in the context of their lives. On the eve of his retirement, Reynolds is bringing in a large gift of drawings from Sol LeWitt, another artist friend. Three floors above the teaser drawing in the Gallery’s lobby, graduate students study certificates to install “Sol LeWitt Wall Drawings: Expanding a Legacy,” an exhibition opening March 2. Reynolds asks one student, who has just
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added a very long graphite line to a grid covering one huge wall, why the work interests her. She loves the physicality of it, she tells our assembly of onlookers haltingly. It’s clear that she’s a bit shaken by the sudden audience: Reynolds has a habit of putting people on the spot like this, catching them unawares but giving them a flattering stage. He picks up when she stops talking, to sing praises of such serious student involvement in the Gallery. “He’s made 1,350 of these,” Reynolds marvels, “none of which look the same. He just keeps finding ways to innovate.” Reynolds asks another assistant to read out the words of this wall’s certificate, for all to hear.
— Ben Levin is a sophomore in Silliman College.
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\ The
Paston Treasure \
microcosm of the known world February 15–May 27, 2018
This exhibition has been organized by the Yale Center for British Art and Norfolk Museums Service Free and open to the public 1080 Chapel Street, New Haven 1 877 BRIT ART | britishart.yale.edu @yalebritishart #PastonTreasure 19
THE NEW JOUR NAL Unknown artist (Dutch School), The Paston Treasure (detail), ca. 1663, oil on canvas, Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery, Norwich, UK, courtesy of Norfolk Museums Service
THE CITY BUILDER Herbert Newman wants to heal the scars of urban renewal. Does everyone have a place in his vision? by Robert Scaramuccia
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ew Haven is a pockmarked city, riddled with reminders of an era when City Hall thought the only way to save it from economic peril was to tear out row houses and typewriter shops and replace them with beasts of concrete and steel. One of those beasts, the Knights of Columbus tower, looms over one such wound: an asphalt wasteland of parking lots, four-lane streets, and fenced-in parks left behind by twenty years of urban renewal. Richard Munday says it’s not all bad. He likes how the tower scoffs at the surrounding streets, its colossal brown pillars refusing to perfectly nestle into the corner of Church Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. But he’s an urban architect, and urban architects typically prefer cities with fabric, their streets and sidewalks and structures all interweaving into a cohesive whole. This area, between Union Station and Gateway Community College, definitely doesn’t
fit that definition. It’s more like downtown’s frayed southern end. The Oak Street Connector freeway extends westward from the I-95, runs behind the Knights of Columbus tower, and feeds into the base of the former Alexion headquarters a few blocks away. Looking from the tower toward the Connector, it’s hard to remember that this blacktop sea used to be the Oak Street neighborhood, which, according to architectural historian Vincent Scully, was “one of the few [racially] integrated enclaves in New Haven.” Unfortunately for the residents who ran its thriving flea markets and lived in its decaying duplexes, Mayor Richard C. Lee (who served as mayor from 1954 to 1970) considered it a den of “whore houses and gin mills.” During his tenure at City Hall, Lee buried Oak Street under paeans to the automobile age, like the Connector, the photo robert scaramuccia
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photo elinor hills
Knights of Columbus tower, and the New Haven Coliseum. A hockey stadium hidden under a four-story parking garage, the Coliseum was demolished in 2007, cheered on by hundreds of New Haveners who thought sparkling new developments would follow. More than a decade later, however, the gash in the city’s fabric remains, stranding residents in the adjacent Hill neighborhood—including the descendants of Oak Street’s refugees—behind the Connector. If Munday and his partners get their way, that will soon change. Munday works for Newman Architects, a local firm that has already designed hundreds of mixed-income apartments and fifty thousand square feet of retail a block over from the empty Coliseum site. Now, they’ve turned their eyes toward the parking lots and barren streets that mark the remains of Oak Street, with the goal of reincorporating this area into downtown. “The development of this area is connected with extending the fabric that you see on that side of George Street, into this area, and then down to the train station,” Munday said. “Suddenly, this becomes not an edge, but a center.” That centering includes extending Orange Street across the Connector and into the Hill, linking it back to the central city. Newman Architects’ founder, Herbert Newman, has been trying to “knit New Haven’s urban areas together again” for longer than almost anyone else. He has shaped the city’s public and commercial spaces over the last fifty years; the Oak Street revival could cement his reputation for reintroducing commerce and civic life to New Haven. Yet his past attempts to balance the interests of Yale, City Hall, and major property developers suggest that this project could further divide the city rather than putting its pieces back together.
“W
e proposed—” Newman starts, then stops. He jolts up to snatch some plans off a shelf across the room, walking less like the eightythree-year-old he is and more like the thirty-something he was when he first opened this office in the nineteen-sixties—no nonsense, impatient to return to his point. Waning November light seeps in through slivers of glass cut into the brick wall, landing on foot-tall foam row houses, new floor plans for a burnt-out church, and a poster that asks, “Can a Public Library Renew Our Civil Society?” Before I can read its answer, Newman is back in his chair, plans on the table. “What we proposed,” he says, pausing for effect this time, “was that we move the city further east.” By “city,” Newman means New Haven’s commercial core, defined by the Nine Squares. The north-south diamond they form has shaped the growth of New Haven, America’s first planned city, ever since colonial surveyor John Brockett cut them into the landscape in 1638. From his brick box of an office on the walkway between Morse College and Mory’s, Newman is trying to add a Tenth where the Coliseum once stood.
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The Knights of Columbus Tower
Which sounds, well, ambitious—maybe even impossible. But not if you’re someone who has already designed, renovated, or planned half the city, including Union Station, City Hall, and a magnet school in Wooster Square. Yale Law School, Jonathan Edwards College, most of Old Campus— the list goes on, and on. This is a man who “sees cities as sort-of a tableau, a canvas,” as New Haven economic development administrator Matthew Nemerson put it. Newman mentions this city in the same breath as “Teotihuacan outside of Mexico City, or Jerusalem, or Athens, or Corinth,” and over the last half-century, he has made it his masterwork. The Tenth Square would be his latest brushstroke. The Knights of Columbus tower and a parking lot the size of a hockey rink now define this part of town, which lies a block southeast of Bow Tie Cinemas and the Omni Hotel. Newman thinks this area, roughly bounded by Union Station, the Ninth Square neighborhood, and the Church Street South housing projects, could become a colony of shops, restaurants, and apartments, all surrounding a new public square. He’s thinking on a scale not typically associated with architects, one at which individual buildings are more like bricks placed in service of a larger whole. “The city becomes the building,” Newman said later. “The city is the architecture.” That sense of scale reigned supreme when Newman first trained as an architect. He spent his early childhood in 21 THE NEW JOUR NAL
nineteen-thirties New York, a city dominated by a “master builder”—and Yale graduate—named Robert Moses who grafted major arteries like the Triborough Bridge and modernist behemoths like Lincoln Center onto the urban grid. By the time his family moved to Waterbury, Connecticut, four-year-old Newman was obsessed with sketching those structures. “This is a stretch, but if New Haven is Rome, then Waterbury is Florence,” Newman said, remembering how he marveled at the towns of the Naugatuck River Valley. Their grand city halls and railroad stations, built by men made rich by the Industrial Revolution, entranced him. He enrolled in the Yale School of Architecture on the heels of Richard Lee’s 1954 election as mayor of New Haven. Lee would soon try his best Moses impersonation, razing “slums” with federal funds and replacing them with the Connector, the Chapel Square Mall, and the Elm Haven high-rises. Most city planners and urban architects welcomed these transformative projects—Newman’s professors were no different. Yale president A. Whitney Griswold commissioned renowned modernists like Eero Saarinen to design Ingalls Rink and Morse and Stiles residential colleges, while the University’s architecture professors praised the magnificence of marble cubes like the Beinecke Library. Newman’s teachers argued that the best buildings conquered their streets, proclaiming their uniqueness rather than fitting into a preexisting fabric. Newman learned those lessons on the fourth floor of one
such building: Louis Kahn’s Yale University Art Gallery, where the architecture school used to be. Its entrance sits back from the street, perpendicular to and raised above the sidewalk. “That building had a profound effect upon me,” he said. “And, of course, Kahn was there as well.” Kahn’s experiments with “structure, mechanical systems, light, [and] space” amazed Newman. He learned to design and draw from the same men who were constructing “great cathedrals” all around him, testing how far they could go “with these aspirations to build to heaven.” After graduating in 1959, Newman got a job with modernist architect I. M. Pei, designer of the Louvre Pyramid and the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. He commuted between New York and New Haven, where he’d started a family. “I did that by train, early in the morning and back late at night,” he said. “The train was a great place to sleep, but it was [also] a great place to work and read.” In 1961, while Newman had all that time to read, a book came out that would fundamentally reshape how he—and the entire architectural field—thought of cities. The Death and Life of Great American Cities was written by a little-known Greenwich Village author, Jane Jacobs. She called her work an “attack on current city planning and rebuilding,” one that denounced the buildings Newman had been trained to build as cold, distant, and fundamentally anti-urban. She thought planners and city officials like Moses in New York and Lee in New Haven were tearing down what
yale institute of sacred music presents
Grete Pedersen conducts
Yale Schola Cantorum · Yale Camerata · with Yale Glee Club
Haydn and Mendelssohn
sunday, march 4 · 4 pm
Woolsey Hall, 500 College St., New Haven Presented with Yale Glee Club
From Shape to Form
Contemporary Latinx artists explore topics including communal/ individual memory and progress/regress Exhibition curated by Jon Seals
on display march 7–june 29 weekdays 9–4
Sterling Divinity Quadrangle, 409 Prospect St., New Haven Opening reception: Wednesday, March 7 · 5 pm 22
Both events are free; no tickets or reservations. ism.yale.edu
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“This is a stretch, but if New Haven is Rome, then Waterbury is Florence,” Newman said. photo elinor hills
cities needed to thrive. “Essentially, Jacobs and others, they saw the joy and the wonder of growing up in neighborhoods where there were street corners where you could shop, and neighbors could meet, and people could sit on stoops and converse with one another,” Newman said. “And people felt safe because they knew who was in the neighborhood and who was not. [Neighborhoods] were lively, they had texture and they had history.” Urban renewal projects ripped those neighborhoods from the city fabric and replaced them with out-of-context modernist objects. The Knights of Columbus tower and the New Haven Coliseum, for example, were simply less personable than the dense neighborhood they supplanted. Newman brought Jacobs’s distaste for urban renewal with him when he left his job with I. M. Pei to accept a teaching position at the School of Architecture and a job working on Yale’s master plan. “It was as if New Haven was part of World War II,” he said. “While European cities were destroyed by bombs, our cities were being destroyed by planners. The bombs [were] being dropped by us.” Working out of a small office on Chapel Street, then quickly moving to his current location near Morse and Stiles, he started on his goal of “replacing the missing teeth” knocked out by modernist planning. Believing “streets are the most important places in cities,” much of his work in New Haven has involved substituting classically urban buildings, like apartment complexes with shops on the ground floor, for the hulking monoliths and vacant lots characteristic of urban renewal. His firm’s design for Arnold Hall on Broadway, for example, provided space for Belgian café Maison Mathis on the bottom floor, while extending the street’s characteristic brick curtains above. 23 FEBRUARY 2018
Newman buildings meld into the streetscape, and are often “spectacular when you see them, but invisible when you don’t,” according to Nemerson, the city official. “He’s not a polemical architect. He’s not about staking out positions,” said Alan Plattus, director of the Yale Urban Design Workshop. “It’s like Herb is right in the middle of things, but not conspicuously.” Over the years, Newman earned a reputation as a “citizen-architect,” one who showed a “genuine commitment to the city” by paying careful attention to history and context rather than trying to build something grand on every street corner. That reputation was fully established by the time Karyn Gilvarg became New Haven’s city planner in the nineteen-nineties. “Herb and [his partners] will pick up the phone and call you if they are curious about something, or if they think they can help, or if they’re concerned about something they see in the paper,” said Gilvarg, who left the City Plan Department in 2017. The phone line also worked in the other direction, when city officials needed to consult with someone who knew the city’s built environment inside and out. That’s essentially what happened with the Tenth Square proposal. The Coliseum was a sports and entertainment arena with a garage suspended above it; rusting and poorly maintained, it not only overshadowed Orange Street, but also blocked views of the sky from the surrounding sidewalks. When former Mayor John DeStefano condemned the structure in 2002, Newman saw a chance to reweave the streets it had suppressed into a more cohesive fabric. Many of his ideas for the site had been tested just a block over in the nineteen-eighties and nineteen-nineties, in the Residences at Ninth Square deveopment. On four blocks near Elm City Market, south of the Green and north of the Oak 23 THE NEW JOUR NAL
Street Connector, Newman had applied his style to an entire neighborhood for the first time—the Ninth Square was his first large-scale attempt “to put the smile back in the mouth of New Haven.” His love for intimate sidewalks and storefronts mixed with the flair for grand gestures he’d learned as an architecture student, leading to a project that some “wish we could keep repeating” throughout the city. Others think it only deepened New Haven’s economic divisions.
New Haven’s Oak Street neighborhood may have been poor, but its dense city streets were more personable than the Knights of Columbus tower and Coliseum that took their place.
“T
his is a drawing of the Ninth Square,” said Munday, Newman’s colleague, showing me a computer-generated skyline with the Ninth Square lit brightly orange. Newman, now wintering in Florida, had sent me back to his firm’s office to look at plans for the neighborhood. “It was mainly warehouses and small businesses,” Munday continues. “Then, during the period of the nineteen-sixties and nineteen-seventies, it emptied out. All those businesses disappeared. What was left were largely empty buildings, or very underutilized buildings.” Before the neighborhood’s decline, five-and-dime stores like W. T. Grant and Kresge’s sold everything from parakeets to dish soap, while Horowitz Bros. sold zippers, fabric, and other sewing materials. One store sold only buttons. “It had this faded museum quality that might’ve been very charming, but was not economically very viable,” said Gilvarg, the city planner. The displacement of Oak Street’s residents, along with white flight to the suburbs, cost those stores many of their shoppers. Facades fell apart and vacant lots cropped up. “New Haven was in pretty bad shape,” Munday said. “There was a pretty strong sentiment that cities were on their way out, that there was no future for cities, really.” In 1989, Newman and his firm produced a master plan to guide real estate developers McCormack Baron and The Related Companies in their revitalization of the Ninth Square. The plans called for the renovation of existing facades and the construction of infill apartments and garages that would unify the streetscape. Altogether, they built 335 mixed-income apartments, with fifty-thousand square feet of ground-floor retail. All the new buildings—including the garages—were covered in orange brick and green window frames to create a unified aesthetic. “They fit in,” Gilvarg
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said. “They don’t look like fake, plastic copies of historic buildings.” The ideals driving Newman’s design, however, ran up against the realities of modern-day development. To remake the urban fabric, the area’s stragglers needed to leave, at least according to the developers and the city. Twenty-five businesses were forced out, leaving “an eyesore of graffiti, soaped windows, and boarded up storefronts,” according to a Yale Law School paper written by law student Christopher Miller. Written in 2011, Miller’s paper captures how difficult it is to create community-oriented living through idealistic design. On one afternoon, Miller saw three middle schoolers playing in a courtyard in the new Ninth Square development, their parents watching them. “After about five minutes a manager came over and walked between the parent and her sister to castigate the children in front of them. ‘No, you are not supposed to play out here, you are not allowed to play ball out here!’” The development’s sidewalks have plaques that memorialize notable community members, but many of the shops, “designed with the downtown office crowd in mind,” are “prohibitively expensive for the average subsidized tenants,” according to the paper. Restaurants like Barcade and 116 Crown price lower-income tenants out of the city fabric that Newman wove back together. Influenced by Jane Jacobs, most architects and planners today would prefer Newman’s contextual, street-based designs over the monumental modernism of Mayor Lee. His designs were meant to welcome all kinds of residents. “I would argue for diversity,” he said. “I would argue that we should not just have shops which have national recognition, which can afford very high rents, and make it a classy place like Rodeo Drive or…Palm Beach.” And yet it’s impossible to separate Newman’s redesign from the gentrification that followed. This paradoxical relationship, between inclusive designs and somewhat exclusive results, is even more apparent in the firm’s follow-up to the Ninth Square: Broadway.
B
roadway, in many ways, is the quintessential expression of Newman’s architectural philosophy, which boils down to three words. “It’s path, it’s place, and it’s portal,” he said. “At the confluence of paths, you can make great places. At those places, you can make portals, which create special points of squeezing people to come together to enter a place.” Sitting at the intersection of paths like Whalley Avenue, Goffe Street, and Elm Street, Broadway is a place that straddles the divide between Yale’s central campus and Dixwell, a historically black New Haven neighborhood. Properly designed, Newman argued, Broadway could act as a portal through which city residents and Yale students could be introduced into one another’s spaces. THE NEW JOURN AL
It definitely wasn’t serving that role when Newman set up shop off Broadway in the nineteen-sixties. New Haven was struggling with poverty and crime, the fruits of urban renewal and deindustrialization. Yale had built most of the residential colleges in the thirties; its twelve gated courtyards, including a few right across from Broadway, choked the connection between the campus and Dixwell. But by the nineteen-eighties, the city’s reputation had deteriorated to the point that Yale started to worry about admissions numbers. Administrators concluded that since the university could not close itself off from New Haven’s problems, they needed some kind of buffer zone between the campus and the city. So a new tactic arose: investing in properties adjacent to the university. Broadway still had several thriving businesses in the nineteen-nineties, including the Yankee Doodle Coffee Shop and Cutler’s record shop. But, according to Newman, the relative lack of shoppers made the presence of panhandlers across the street from undergraduate housing more obvious. Students in the architecture school had been reimagining Broadway as part of their coursework for years. Yale took those ideas, and hired Newman to run with them. “It was Yale turning its face, rather than its back, to the city,” Newman said. “We were the instrument.” His firm seemed the perfect team for the task, having been located just off Broadway for thirty years. When Newman was hired, you could still conceivably claim his offices were on the dividing line between college and city. The fact that Nemerson, the city’s economic development chief, could characterize the neighborhood today as “the epitome of Yale” speaks to how effectively Newman’s redesign rebranded the street. Widened brick sidewalks, narrowed roads, cast iron fences and lampposts, American elms that hid a central parking lot—with these modifications, Newman Architects facilitated the creation of “The Shops at Yale.” Sprucing up the street made it much easier for Yale to rent out Broad-
way properties it had bought up, which in turn brought more pedestrians to the area. “It isn’t that there’s less panhandlers there now than there were in the nineteen-sixties and nineteen-seventies,” Newman said. “Many of them are the same people that I’ve known for fifty years on those streets.” He says the number of panhandlers, “fundamentally safe” people “trying to make a living,” has stayed the same, but the increase in shoppers has improved the street’s reputation. That may have truth to it. But the street isn’t a sort-of urban utopia, the kind of thing Jane Jacobs might hold up as a model of dense, integrated urban living. Shoppers from the suburbs, having parked in the elm-lined parking lot, don’t often stop to speak with the locals waiting under the newly painted bus shelter. And any panhandler would be hard-pressed to collect enough money to buy anything at most of the stores on the street, as Barbour, Lou Lou, and a dozen other “unique boutique[s]” have replaced the diners and record shops. “That is a danger, no question about it,” Newman said about Broadway’s gentrification. “The university is in a unique position to be able to balance the aspirations of its real estate holdings with those of its students, and all of the citizens and people who live in New Haven.” It has failed so far, in the eyes of those who consider the street an extension of the “Yale bubble.” Munday, the partner at Newman’s firm, pointed out that Broadway has always been a shopping street, and that “commerce is at the heart of cities.” And there’s an argument to be made for high-end shopping districts, whose properties can be taxed substantially to fund public services for struggling areas. But a gentrified city street doesn’t quite live up to Newman’s inclusive vision. His brick sidewalks effectively claimed the street for Yale, making it less of a portal and more of a boundary.
His brick sidewalks effectively claimed the street for Yale, making it less of a portal and more of a boundary. photo elinor hills
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25 THE NEW JOUR NAL
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ewman’s role in Yale’s conquering of Broadway seems almost like the payment of a debt, whether the architect intended it to be or not. The University not only gave him his degree, but also offered him his first job in a city he reveres. It invested $12.5 million in the Ninth Square redevelopment, which Newman says “wouldn’t have happened without Yale.” If Newman has his way, something similar could happen with the Tenth Square. “That’s an opportunity here,” Newman says, hitting the table in his office for emphasis. “Some people at Yale would argue that, ‘Well, the Coliseum site is a little far away’…I don’t believe that. New Haven is a small town. Each of these tendrils, they reach out and they call to each other.” The Tenth Square project has been mired in delays since 2011, when Newman officially signed on to create a master plan. The original plans for the site stretched across six city blocks, including a new community college on Church Street, residential, retail, and office space on the Knights of Columbus and Coliseum parking lots, and infill buildings on the other side of George Street. Newman’s designs called for a grand, tree-lined avenue parallel to George St., the kind of public street that “make[s] you proud of being a citizen of a city like New Haven, because you’re there with everybody else,” he said. Importantly for the Hill, the plans also included an extension of Orange Street over the Connector and into the detached neighborhood. It would become a path that connected residents of Church Street South to the new civic hub, and downtown as a whole. Yet, in 2018, nothing has been built. The developer, LiveWorkLearnPlay, has had trouble financing the project. Delay after delay has forced the firm to rein in its plans. Gateway Community College went up on Church Street in 2012, but it wasn’t designed by Newman. The Knights of Columbus have
backed out of building anything on their lot. Most of the residents of Church Street South were relocated after the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development judged it uninhabitable. The Tenth Square now only includes the lot on which the Coliseum once stood. That lot is still big enough to host almost one-thousand apartments, along with thousands of square feet of retail space. But Newman has gone from his late seventies to his early eighties since signing onto the project. The Tenth Square could be the last floor he adds to the building that is his city, a final statement of what New Haven should look and feel like, of how its residents could interact with one another. And it’s hard to know what that statement will ultimately be. Newman is known—even loved—for helping rebuild New Haven after the ravages of urban renewal. Yet for all his adoration of Jane Jacobs’s sidewalks and storefronts, there’s evidence of a modernist streak left over from the days of Kahn and Moses and Lee, one that compels him toward the creation of modern-day “cathedrals” even as he acknowledges the failures of the old. For all his emphasis on inclusivity, his two largest projects have contributed to gentrification. This citizen-architect, earnestly trying to build the city for all, has been caught up in Yale’s incursions into nearby neighborhoods. Spaces like Broadway and the Ninth Square are well-designed, civic, and enjoyable, but often only if you make enough money. If the Tenth Square gets built, only to be filled with more “unique boutiques” and Barcades, then the philosophy of path, place, and portal will fall short of filling the holes created by urban renewal.
— Robert Scaramuccia is a junior in Trumbull College.
photo elinor hills
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poem
FROM A DARK HOUSE Dimitri Diagne
illustration Hazal Özgür
The sky keeps its service, does not open. There is no sun but no rain either. Dusk moves fast— I do not see the shadows fade Child of early night, I long to see you Know this first of all: I will not hurt you I am like a star, but less warm There is no planet orbiting my center and my planet has no star— cast into the void, a silence takes hold Thank you for still listening. I love you but not without limit The long-travelled sea, the meadow empty in spring. We go through all of this for what? A blue mountain fixed on the horizon—a tree that we think is tall, but is not so when we approach it, moving nearer to that mountain, which is in a storm and on its slopes, has frozen snow Yet when we walk, I feel at ease The distance fades—into small ice canyons air passes like a well-made road with no dimensions, and no rival as there is no second sun in binary with our own. I hope that you can see this. That you look up at the eclectic sky and see one tone
— Dimitri Diagne is a senior in Berkeley College.
I SAID TO DIMITRI what if trombones were animals — Ruby Bilger is a senior in Branford College. 27
THE NEW JOUR NAL
BUT IT’S YOU by Rachel Calnek-Sugin
Do our sex offender laws actually make communities safer? illustrations julia hedges
I
f you were a potential employer or landlord, this is what you would learn about John Tejada from a quick internet search: his age (40), his height (6’1”), his weight (260 lbs), his race (black), his eyes (brown), his address (in Hartford, Connecticut) how many scars he has (three: two on the knees, one on the ankle), his tattoos (the Superman logo on his right butt-cheek). You would also learn that he was convicted of sexual assault in the second degree in March 2014. This is information that John has to confirm or update every ninety days, when he gets his official letter in the mail. If he is late, state law enforcement will mark him “non-compliant” in bold, red type. You would find the headlines about John’s offense in tabloid-like papers like the Connecticut Post and the Cheshire Patch. You probably wouldn’t rent him an apartment or give him a job. You wouldn’t necessarily know that John was born in Brooklyn (the posh part) to a dentist and a judge, that he went to one of New York’s top public high schools, and that he completed a computer science degree at Notre Dame, where he was a nationally-ranked fencer. After graduating, he worked in administrative positions at Merrill Lynch, Lord and Taylor, and ESPN. These were the kinds of jobs that required him to wear a suit every day, and he liked that. You might find out that he coached high school fencing, first
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in New Jersey, then in Fairfield, CT. Along the way, he got married, had a baby, won state coach-of-the-year four times, became depressed, started fighting with his wife, and began an intimate relationship with one of the senior girls on the team. You would, almost certainly, learn that she was seventeen. John says that she came onto him and that they never actually had sex. What the statute for second degree assault reflects is that meaningful consent is impossible between an adult and a minor before the law. John doesn’t deny it: “I was a coach, in a position of power, absolutely…I know I did something wrong. I absolutely did. I know I hurt her.” It’s beside the point, but I like John. When he enters the Cedarhurst Café in New Haven, he is wearing a navy blue suit, a checkered shirt, a pocket square, and sunglasses perched atop his almost bald head. The suit surprises me: most of the people I’ve spoken with on the state sex-offender registry are unemployed, self-employed, or working at fastfood restaurants. He saunters up to the counter and orders the “pumpkin spiced chai whatever it is” that is advertised on the chalkboard outside, which, when he comes to join me at the high table by the window, he says tastes like “warm pumpkin milk.” We agree that there are worse things. John has a soft, slow voice, which starts self-conscious, but grows self-assured as he gets deeper into his story.
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The offense occurred six years ago. The victim’s parents had discovered intimate texts with John on her cellphone and reported them to the school, which fired John as a coach. His then-wife, who had recently given birth to their second son, kicked him out, and he slept in cars, hotels, and at friends’ houses. His victim didn’t press charges until the end of 2013, when she was a freshman in college. According to John, she had a breakdown and her parents encouraged her to report him to law enforcement. He was arrested and sentenced to ten years with a suspended sentence after two, and ten years’ probation. Once in jail, John was placed in the medical wing on suicide watch. Incarceration can be especially rough for those convicted of sex offenses, who he says are vilified within prisons more than any other group, but John weighed close to three hundred pounds and could bench 350, so nobody tried to fight him. After getting off suicide watch, he spent his time tutoring other inmates for the GED, and when he was released in 2016, he was looking forward to rebuilding his life. But John had lost everything: his family, his job, his money, his car, his belongings. The first order of business was to buy clothes. His first set of probation stipulations prohibited him from going to a mall, or anywhere where teens congregate, so he stood around in his prison-discharge gym shorts, contemplating all the small ways life would look different now, before heading to a Banana Republic. Next on the list was housing. John says he was rejected from over a hundred apartments in Hartford—which isn’t unusual for individuals on the registry. State and federal housing subsidies explicitly deny eligibility to registered offenders. Private landlords are under no obligation to exclude people on the registry, but it doesn’t count as housing discrimination when they do. So John moved into a hotel. The Days Inn in Hartford is close enough to Bradley International Airport that he could hear the planes as they came and went. It was under construction at the time, which made the rooms cheaper.
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John describes it as the kind of place where kids would go after prom. He got to know the Indian family who owned it; they were friendly, and they would chat before he went out to the library in the mornings. John arrived at the library at 9:25 a.m. so he could secure a computer when it opened at 9:30—the terms of his probation banned him from owning his own computer, and they required him to leave the library in the afternoons when school got out, because, like the mall, it was somewhere teens came to hang out. When he first got out of prison, the only children he was allowed to spend time with were his own. John says he applied to hundreds of jobs, and “a lot of people said no. Everybody said no. It was hell.” Eventually, somebody said yes, and he started working at a warehouse, preparing bulk food shipments to send to supermarkets. Then another yes, and he got a job with a local newspaper. He was promoted, he passed his polygraph, and his probation restrictions started to ease up. He found an apartment in Hartford through a sympathetic building manager who had served three years himself, and he moved out of the hotel. Things were looking up. Then the paper fired him—journalism was so public and he was too much of a liability—and he was back to the job search. The offense would come up in different ways during interviews. Sometimes they would notice the gap in his work experience while he’d been incarcerated and would ask for an explanation. Sometimes they would inquire about a background check. Sometimes it was at the very end, when they asked if there was anything else they should know. “I got in trouble,” John would tell them. “A couple of years ago when I was running this fencing program I had an inappropriate relationship with a high school senior…it was a dark period of my life.” At Voya Financial, a personal finance company, his interviewers had told him they didn’t think it would affect how he did the job, so they invited him back for an aptitude test. The HR person told him that he had gotten the first ten she had ever seen. He got an offer. “I was really excited,” he says, “I could wear suits again.” They did a background check, then sent him his paperwork. He set up his health insurance. Two weeks later, he got a call: they couldn’t hire him after all. “There’s no coming back from it,” he says, “You’re the monster.” Now, John’s sons—three and six—are growing up without him. The little one is built “like a brick house,” the kind of kid, he says, who could “take your lunch money by just looking at you.” The older one is sweet; he takes care of his brother. John hasn’t seen his mother—who has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s—in nearly six years. His ex-wife isn’t speaking to him. Neither are most of his friends: only two had come to visit him in prison, and his social life didn’t get much better after his release. He was banned from fencing. And making new friends is almost impossible: you can’t make THE NEW JOUR NAL
work friends when you’re unemployed, and probation prevents him from going to bars. He spends a lot of time at the sofa. He sometimes does two-a-day workouts at the gym. He calls it “killing the time.” He calls it “getting more and more depressed.” He calls it “a lonely, lonely thing.” I ask John what he’s doing now, and he says he’s looking for work again. He was at a career fair today, then at an interview for a job at a furniture retail chain, Raymour & Flannigan. That explains the suit. He tells me about sneezing so hard that the shirt’s top button popped off. That had been embarrassing. He took off his necktie, because he thought it looked messy to wear a tie if the shirt wasn’t done up all the way. We leave the café together. It’s a beautiful day, sunny and cool. “I don’t want to say it’s not fair, because you did something and if you didn’t do what you did you wouldn’t have to ever deal with this,” he says, “But when is the punishment ending?”
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n December 2017, the Connecticut Sentencing Commission—a non-partisan body comprised of activists, law enforcement, and local and state government officials— came out with a proposal on how the state might improve policy regarding people convicted of sex offenses. In 2015, they set out to investigate sentencing, risk assessment and registration requirements, as well as victim and survivor needs, making Connecticut among the first states to re-evaluate the registry (California and Oregon led the charge). Thomas Ullmann, who was New Haven’s chief public defender for thirty years, hopes that the state will take action soon to “change the landscape” of what sex offender laws look like around the nation. The U.S. state sex offender registries weren’t created until 1994. At that time, they were supposed to be administrative rather than punitive, and only law enforcement officials were able to see them—a far cry from the publicly available online sites we have now. The 1994 Jacob Wetterling Act, which mandated the creation of those first registries, was named after an eleven-yearold boy who was abducted and murdered in his Minnesota hometown. His mother, Patty Wetterling, ardently lobbied, first in Minnesota and then in D.C., for the creation of private registries that would allow law enforcement to keep track of people they deemed “high risk.” But in the nearly twenty-five years that have elapsed since then, the laws that govern registration of those convicted of sex crimes has gotten much more punitive than she had imagined. Congress has since passed a series of laws, all of them named for young children who were abused and murdered in tragic abduction cases, and precipitated by the activism of their parents, that have increased the number of years individuals stay on sex offender registry, broadens the scope of the information listed, and have made those registries public. It’s not obvious why a sex offender registry became the goal of lobbyists outraged by these incidents of child abduction.
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What is clear is that activists and lawmakers alike seized onto that outrage—and a national preoccupation with sex crimes that Hartford public defender Tejas Bhatt calls a “mass hysteria phenomenon”—that led to the almost unilateral success of these lobbying efforts. Those working to eliminate or reduce the sex offender registry often point to the fact that the U.S. does not have registries for most other kinds of crimes: “Do we have a registry of people who rob stores?” Bhatt, asks, rhetorically, “Maybe that would be useful for store-owners.” The U.S. doesn’t have public registries for people convicted of murder, non-sexual assault, or extortion, either. Before registration requirements, people convicted of sex offenses were typically sentenced for their crimes, served time in prison or jail, and faced parole restrictions for a period after their release. They had the same obstacles to community integration that face every felon released from U.S. prison. But they did not have their personal information—including their address and photograph—published on a public list. Although the registration laws were prompted by public outcry in response to rare, horrific cases of child abduction, they apply to perpetrators of a wide range of sex crimes. New Haven public defender Thomas Ullmann points out the discrepancy between the nature of the stranger-danger offenses that informed the registry laws and the assaults by acquaintances that are so much more prevalent. According to RAINN, the largest anti-sexual-assault organization in the U.S., 93 percent of victims in juvenile sexual abuse cases reported to law enforcement know their perpetrators; for adults, seven out of ten reported rapes are committed by someone the victim knows. Ullmann says that “most people think the registry is predicated on public safety, but it’s actually counterproductive to public safety,” because it prevents offenders from getting jobs, pulls them out of housing, and “pushes them to other kinds of crime.” Even Patty Wetterling has become a vocal critic. “We’ve caught a lot of people in the net who could have been helped,” she told City Pages in 2013. “We’ve been elevating 31 THE NEW JOUR NAL
sex offender registration and community notification and punishment for twenty-some years, and a wise and prudent thing would be to take a look at what’s working. Instead we let our anger drive us.” Where does misperception of public safety come from? Ira Ellman, a professor of psychology and law at UC Berkeley’s Law School and Arizona State University, partially chalks it up to a false statistic that Justice Anthony Kennedy cited in a landmark 2003 Supreme Court ruling, which was then repeated in decisions of over a hundred lower courts. Kennedy called recidivism rates for former offenders “frightening and high.” The statistic that he cited, 80 percent, would indeed be frightening and high—if it was true. Ellman traces it back to a single article in Psychology Today, one that is contradicted by state-wide re-offense studies that show sex-crime recidivism rates that hover between 2 and 5 percent. Effectiveness studies in Washington, New Jersey, and New York conclude that public notification has no meaningful impact on rates of recidivism. A 2012 study concluded that only 2.7 percent of men offended a second time after their release from Connecticut prison. The Sentencing Commission’s interim report considers the claim that “these laws may not prevent recidivism or sexual violence and, in fact, may do more harm than good.” The registry does little to curtail sex crimes committed by individuals that have not yet been registered—rather than preventing these offenses, the system allocates resources towards punishing former offenders. The Sentencing Commission’s draft proposal suggests a switchover from an offense-based registry to a risk-based one. As Ullmann explains it, the current registry system means that at the point of conviction, individuals end up on the registry for either ten years or life, depending on the statute, with no opportunity for removal. The new system would divide offenders into three categories: low, moderate, and high risk offenders. Low risk offenders would end up on a private law enforcement only (LEO) registry for ten years and moderate risk offenders on a LEO registry for twenty years; the public registry would be reserved for individuals deemed high risk. Address verification, which currently happens every ninety days, would also exist on a tiered system, where each group would be required to verify their information annually, semiannually, and quarterly, 32
respectively. Ullmann estimates that about 85 percent of the fifty-three hundred people currently on Connecticut’s registry would qualify as low risk. The Sentencing Commission’s final proposal will serve as a recommendation to the legislature. It will still be an uphill battle to sign it into law. Blindly aggressive sex crime legislation is uncontroversial in most legislative chambers, but some state supreme court cases have started to declare probation stipulations like residency restrictions and prohibitions on internet usage unconstitutional. One decision calls the registry “cruel and unusual punishment.” Drastically reducing the public registry would alleviate barriers to housing, employment, and community reintegration. It would also acknowledge that the registry encompasses a heterogeneous population—one could end up on it for anything from pornography charges to (in some states) public indecency to statutory rape (including a relationship between, say, a 15 and an 18 year old) to violent assault—and that it should address different offenses accordingly. The Connecticut Sentencing Commission has attempted to draft a proposal based on data rather than fear. Ullmann describes the proposal as a compromise—which means, he says, that both offenders’ families and victims’ rights advocates “think it’s crazy.” Offenders’ families think it isn’t going far enough: they particularly object to the lack of retroactivity in the proposal, meaning that the fifty-three hundred already on the registry would mostly stay. For victims and their advocates, it’s a more complicated story.
“M
y name is Donna Palomba,” she testified to the Sentencing Commission at a public hearing in January 2017, “and I am a survivor of rape. I urge you to always remember the victim. And remember the sex offender offended and committed the crime of sexual violence: child sex abuse, sexual assault, rape. The victim has endured the trauma of this sexual violence which carries a life sentence.” In 1993, Donna was violently raped by a masked intruder who entered her home and held a gun to her head. Her husband was away on a business trip and her children were sleeping in their bedroom down the hall. When the first responders came, they criticized her for appearing too calm. One said she seemed “flippant.” Donna thinks we have an image of how victims should act that doesn’t account for the way that trauma warps emotions and behaviors: “Victims often get ridiculed because they didn’t cry enough,” she says. Because he had been wearing a mask, Donna had been unable to identify her perpetrator, but a DNA test found him eleven years later when he was being prosecuted for another assault. She describes him as a family man who had grown up with her husband since kindergarten. “We never would have expected it would be him,” she says. He was taken into custody, and when he was out on bond, he raped an underage THE NEW JOURN AL
girl from a nearby high school. He is now in prison in New York. Fifteen years later, Donna started Jane Doe No More, an organization dedicated to improving the way society perceives survivors. With its mantra of “no more shame, no more blame, no more fear,” Jane Doe No More runs programs like “Duty Trumps Doubt,” which trains first responders to put their preconceived notions aside and begin by believing the victim, and “Survivors Speak,” which helps survivors learn to articulate and speak publicly about their stories. When survivors can “speak their truth,” she says, “something happens, something transformative. They’re taking back some of the control that the perpetrator stole from them.” In terms of policy, Donna believes that the most important thing is for the victim to be included in the legal process. “There’s an underlying thought, that is incorrect, that we don’t want to reach out to them because they’re fragile, because they’re made of glass,” she says, “but they absolutely want to be involved in the process.” Donna says she thinks the sex offender registry is “really important.” Jane Doe No More posts links to the state registries on its website. Registries are “safety first” she says, and then, “I think there’s core offenders that will offend again. I think they need to be heavily monitored.” Her perpetrator, a serial offender, would certainly qualify. But she hesitates when asked what she thinks the point of the registry is. “As I understand it,” she says, “It’s just a voluntary way for any individual to check who their neighbors are, to see if they might live in terror on the same street…it’s knowledge to avoid that road.” Despite her testimony to the Sentencing Commission, she doesn’t necessarily disagree with their proposal, though she says she would be cautious about policy reform. She singles out a “Romeo and Juliet type of thing”—statutory rape convictions for consensual relationships between teens a few years apart—as a scenario where she believes perpetrators should be treated less harshly. At the public hearing, she ended her testimony with a list of guidelines. The final one was: “Decisions about how to address victims’ needs should be based on sound information and research.”
B
y the time Scott Schwartz was four years old, he could read, write, and throw a good punch. Knowing how to fight was a simple self-defense mechanism for Scott, growing up the youngest of three boys in the Bronx. At four, he had his first drink—
33
he’s come to understand that he felt his life was spinning out of control, and that he was attempting, in turn, to control another person.
his brothers thought it would be funny, though it quickly became unfunny, and the night ended in the hospital with Scott getting his stomach pumped for the first time. One night seventeen years later, Scott was drunk at an awards dinner. He describes himself as an “all-American kid” at the University of Las Vegas, but by this point, he’d lost his job, his relationship was rocky, he was drinking so much that he was usually “either passed out or belligerent,” and he felt reaffirmed in a childhood conviction that he was a failure destined to end up alone. He drove home from the dinner angry, knowing that he and his girlfriend would fight about his drinking when he got upstairs. That was when it happened. He saw his neighbor through the window of her apartment. She was naked, and he went inside and attempted to rape her. In the years that have elapsed since then, Scott says, he’s come to understand that he felt his life was spinning out of control, and that he was attempting, in turn, to control another person. But it wasn’t only about dominance, he insists: “It’s also a sexual thing, and I think that’s often forgotten… It’s about wanting that connection too, even though it’s not a real connection. Sex is a very intimate thing, and if you’re looking to control in that way you are looking for some kind of intimacy. Even if it’s totally fake intimacy.” When Scott attempts to explain his mental state at the time of the offense, I’m grateful for my position as a journalist. It’s almost—but not quite—possible, when you have a notebook and a tape recorder, and when you are the one asking the questions, to put aside your position as 21-yearold woman who knows about the realities of sexual assault. Being a young woman in this country means, in part, that you are constantly reminded that you are a sexual object, subject to the whims and lusts and mercies of men who are bigger and stronger and can hold more liquor than you. Men have said things to you; they have touched you without asking. If you haven’t been assaulted, your friends have, and they’ve told you about it late at night after three glasses of wine at the kitchen counter, or cuddling on the couch just before falling asleep: in quiet voices, in private places. Some of the women you know who have survived sexual violence are OK. Some of them aren’t. Most of them never report the assault to the authorities (studies from the National Sexual Violence 33 THE NEW JOUR NAL
Scott Schwartz at his parents’ home. Photo by Robbie Short Research Center estimate that sixty-three percent of sexual assaults are never reported). I face green-eyed, well-spoken Scott across the table and think: you are a person, and you did a horrible, horrible thing. The question of policy reform opens itself up to many more abstract questions. Is punishment the only real form of accountability? Is it possible to wade through the murk of shame and fear to have better conversations about sex and sexual violence? Do we believe that people can change? My personal answers to these questions were tested on the morning of a Sentencing Commission hearing. Cindy Prizio, the founder and director of Connecticut for One Standard of Justice (CTOSJ), an organization that advocates for the rights of those on the registry called, had put me in touch with Vinnie, one of the guys she worked with. Vinnie offered to give me a ride to Hartford. It was a generous offer: he lived in Waterbury and it would take him nearly three hours to swing by New Haven to pick me up and drop me off. I hesitated: getting into a car with somebody convicted of a sex offense seemed high on the list of things I’d been warned in girlhood not to do. But wasn’t I setting out to counter those fears and 34
misconceptions? I accepted, thanked him, and agreed that we’d text about timing in the morning. All I knew about Vinnie, besides the fact that he was on the registry, was that he worked at Stop and Shop, had a son, drove a pick-up truck, and laughed easily when we talked on the phone. I was sure, I told myself, that the ride would be just fine. But for peace of mind, I decided to look him up, hoping that he, like many people on the registry, would be a non-violent offender. As it turned out, Vinnie had been convicted of first degree assault in 2002. The appeal, which was struck down by the Connecticut Court of Appeals, was available online. I read the fifteen pages graphically describing how he’d raped his high school friend at their twentieth reunion. I felt physically ill. I couldn’t bring myself to get in a car with him. In the morning, I texted that I was feeling sick. “I’m sorry to hear that,” he wrote back. “Hope you feel better soon.” I’m sure that nothing bad would’ve happened had I driven to Hartford with Vinnie. He’d been convicted fifteen years before, and I knew that offenders who’d been on the registry for over ten years were extremely unlikely to be dangerous. But this tension between how we feel and what we rationally know is at the core of our misperceptions and our policies. The question here isn’t exactly whether we forgive Scott and Vinnie and other violent offenders. As Hartford public defender Tejas Bhatt points out, there are only two choices: “Either we decide to give all these people life sentences or we figure out how to reintegrate them into our communities.” Scott has been out of prison for eleven years. The night he committed the offense was the last time he ever drank. His record since then has been clean in every way. But the registry made him the target of harassment, made his job search at least as difficult as John’s, and plunged him into debt. He says inclusion on the registry is “still a sentence. It’s keeping me from living life, getting a job, making money.” Scott and John think of themselves as the lucky ones: they both have homes, advanced degrees, and some hope for their futures. Other offenders slip more completely through the cracks. There’s a man in my neighborhood who, after doing research for this piece, I now recognize from the registry; I see him often in the late afternoons, collecting cans in a clear garbage bag. I try to make eye contact with him, but he keeps his head down. A man named Tim told me about his difficulty accessing welfare services after his release, because these services—like the free eye-care clinic he’d wanted to visit—were housed in churches, which probation prevented him from entering. “I can’t see without these,” he says, jamming his finger at the thin, rectangular, tortoiseshell glasses that sit prominently on his nose. “How can we expect people to be law abiding citizens if I can’t even get glasses?” A man who identified himself as “Bob” testified to the Sentencing Commission that “being a sex offender in Connecticut is a death sentence…I sit in my apartment or take long walks to THE NEW JOURN AL
pass the days. With no hope what else can I do? What else could anyone do?”
E
very state has a sex offender registry—there are about 861,500 people registered nationally—and from coast to coast, people are starting to talk about their scope, efficacy, and collateral consequences. Alissa Ackerman, a sex crimes policy expert at California State University, who is both a survivor of sexual violence and an advocate for policy change, believes in better alternatives. Like Bhatt and the folks at CTOSJ, she thinks that laws about registration and residency restrictions are counterproductive: “The public is so outraged that someone would commit this harm that they will stand beside them, even though research shows that these laws don’t make us any safer,” she says, then adds: “Do you want to feel safe or do you want to be safe?” Ackerman was raped when she was sixteen. She barely made it through high school and then dropped out of college after her first semester. She’d been a biology major, an aspiring doctor, and a walk-on to the softball team on full scholarship, but by the time Thanksgiving rolled around she was drinking too much and spiraling out of control. At the time, she said, she thought of the man who raped her as a monster. But when she made it back to Florida State University and took her first class in human behavior, she started to wonder what had happened to him that would lead him to cause this sort of pain to another human being. Instead of treating sex offenses as a criminal justice problem, we might look at them as a public health issue. Offenders rarely have the opportunity to sit face to face with their victim so they can understand the repercussions of their actions. Ackerman is piloting what she calls a “vicarious restorative justice” program in California (as a survivor, not a researcher), where survivors sit down with perpetrators of other people’s sexual assaults. At this point, she has talked with over two hundred perpetrators: she says this allows her to be “kind and compassionate and also tough” and to “challenge them in ways their treatment providers can’t.” Once, she says, she assumed the position of a man who had served twenty years for a violent rape. She used her experience to say: “This is what you did to me.” By the end, they were both crying. “I realize I could have been your perpetrator and you could have been my victim,” she remembers him saying, “and I am so sorry for the harm that I have caused you.” Scott’s victim testified at his trial, which helped him in therapy, he says, because it made him understand the extent of the harm that he caused. When he heard her speak about nightmares, night sweats, panic attacks, and relationship problems, he thought: I did that. He thought: How could you trust somebody if someone came in the night? “I know I affected you in all these ways,” he wrote in an unsent letterto-the-victim that was part of his therapy program. “If I could take it back, I would.”
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C
indy Prizio, the director of CTOSJ, drives me to the First Congregational Church in Guilford, where we set up for a screening of Untouchable, a documentary about people on the registry that tries to capture perspectives of both victims and perpetrators. In 2015, one of Cindy’s close family members was convicted of sexual assault, leading to his incarceration and registration. That was when she started to learn about the world of sex offender laws and threw herself into the advocacy that might be able to change them. Her cause is unpopular both in policy circles and in public imagination. “You’ve got the ugliest baby in the orphanage,” Cindy remembers someone saying to her. But she’s fighting for that baby with everything she’s got. CTOSJ has been holding meetings, doing outreach, and rallying supporters to testify at hearings, but this screening is their first ever public event. By the time we start, about twenty-five people—some supporters of the organization, some Guilford church-goers—have filtered in. After the movie, Reverend Ginger opens up the discussion. At first, everyone is more or less in agreement: Bhatt, the public defender, calls the laws “out of hand” and says he doesn’t “know what we get from putting people on a public registry.” Vivien Blackford, from the Sentencing Commission, says that these requirements couldn’t exist “if people thought of sex offenders as human beings.” A couple of men on the registry weigh in with their experiences. We talk about the difficulty of finding employment and securing housing, the absurdity the standard conditions of probation, like not being allowed to use a computer, and the mandatory fees for treatment, polygraphs, and monitoring software that often plunge struggling ex-offenders into debt. Then Cindy says that victims have too much power in the legal proceedings in the state of Connecticut, and that is when—as she will refer to the discussion in the car on our way back—things start to get “vigorous.” Community members fire back. Bhatt says legislation that doesn’t take the victim’s perspective into account won’t win, and it won’t be right. A woman named Karen, who is both a survivor of sexual violence and an advocate for a family member on the registry, agrees with him. Suddenly everyone is picking a side. Cindy’s leg is trembling and Maria—who has a son on the
registry—is shaking her fist. Reverend Ginger tries to calm things down by speaking over the commotion: “Those on the registry and those who have been abused, both have had their lives ruined.”
J
ohn says that everyone has their “but it’s you” moment. For him, it was at his old friend Caroline’s house. Her ten-year-old daughter was climbing all over his broad shoulders, as she had all her life. “Caro,” John said, turning to her, “What would you do if you didn’t know me, and you heard someone like me moved in next door?” She said she would look into it, that she would want to know what the situation was. “Caro, really?” John asked, grinning. “You’re telling me you wouldn’t be there with the pitchforks trying to burn my house down?” “But it’s you,” she said. Perpetrators of sexual violence are our coaches and neighbors and friends from high school. They are our sons and our boyfriends and our childhood playmates. We might be the victims of their assaults, or someone we love might be, or someone we know, or someone we’ve never met. The moment we recognize that they are our people is when we start to see them as people. I think if I had gotten in the car with Vinnie, we would have had a good conversation. We might’ve cracked jokes. I might have liked him. I might have thought about how much time had passed since his offense, or that people can change, or that I almost always believe in second chances. I probably would’ve felt the futility and the injustice of the registry system as I learned about his obstacles to community reintegration after his release from prison. And all the while I would have hated that he raped somebody, and hated that sexual violence happens. Every so often, there would be a lapse in conversation, and I would look at his face or out the window, and we would continue along the highway, towards Hartford, and the hearing, and hopefully, something better.
When he heard her speak about nightmares, night sweats, panic attacks, and relationship problems, he thought: I did that.
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— Rachel Calnek-Sugin is a junior in Silliman College.
THE NEW JOUR NAL
ENDNOTE
MANE MAN He knows everyone. Get to know him. WILLIAM REID
O
ne morning in January, Joe Moscato and I shook hands for the first time. Five minutes later, he was drawing on my face. “It’s all about having an eye to see where things belong,” he said, tilting my chin with one hand as he added an inch to my sideburns with a black eye pencil. Once he’d finished shading, Joe gestured along my cheekbone to show how a longer cut would accentuate my features. “It’s all about working with what you’ve got.” I had to admit: I looked chiseled. Joe smiled over my shoulder into the salon mirror. His own hair, swept tall on top and buzzed thin on the sides, made his already long face seem longer. His round cheeks reddened as he smiled: a cherub with a pompadour. Joe is 65. He was born at Yale-New Haven Hospital before they called it that. For nearly five decades, he’s manicured mops and manes from all over Connecticut. He cuts men and women. “Hair doesn’t have a sex,” he said. “Shake it in a bag. It’s still hair.” But Joe isn’t just a hairdresser. He’s the most famous New Havener you’ve never heard of. Some clients call him the Mayor. In 2007, Joe joined the Mane Room at the Omni Hotel on Temple Street, where he’s found a devoted following among boatloads of Yalies. That’s not just a figure of speech: he cuts hair for most of the heavyweight crew team. Bojan Dosljak ’19 recommended him in the team’s group chat. Bojan has gone to Joe since his sophomore year. They have a pretty casual relationship, Bojan said, meeting once a month for a trim. But when Bojan, who’s from Serbia, had nowhere to go for Thanksgiving dinner, Joe invited him to his family’s gathering. “He’s always talking about his cooking,” Bojan said. “It was a really nice gesture.” Jonathan Green, a VP of Finance at the Yale-China Association, schedules his haircuts six months in advance. If you move a lot, he said, “the two most nerve-racking things are finding a dentist and a hairdresser.” When he moved to New Haven in 2011, he had to find both. Luckily, Joe was easy to find. Jonathan had moved into an apartment across the street from the salon. One day he walked in off the street and asked for an appointment. “Joe overhears, and he comes around
37
illustrations Hazal Özgür
the corner and says, ‘I cut your hair. Make the appointment with me,’” Jonathan recalled. “I loved it.” Since then, “I have not cheated on Joe once,” he said. “I have an enormous amount of trust in him. It’s a great relationship to have with a professional.” Joseph Giammittorio, who graduated from Yale in 2016, learned about Joe from his Big Sib in Jonathan Edwards. The first time they met, Joseph thought, “This man is New Haven. This guy can really go back and forth between all different kinds of communities.” “Plus,” Joseph said, “he’s got this Italian flair.” They met once a month, from freshman fall to senior spring. The appointments were “as much for the friendship as for the haircut.”
A
bell chimed at 10 a.m. as Joe’s first appointment of the day entered the salon, which smelled like a vanilla candle. She went straight to the salon seat next to mine. Joe tossed a black salon cape over her and started to comb out her short, grey-blonde hair. “How long have we known each other?” Nancy thought about it. “About ten years.” “More! I first cut your hair in 2004, 2005.” He turned to me. “When Nancy first came to me, she was an accountant.” She’d gone from accounting into real estate. Then she started a business with her son. (“He was a realtor for a hot second,” she expounded.) Somewhere along the way, her husband passed, Joe added. Throughout the synopsis, Nancy wore a flat grin, like she’s not used to having someone remember her story in such detail. “Now she’s a realtor herself!” Joe concluded. “How would you describe me?” “Oh, you’re an absolute pro,” she said. “She’s cheated on me, you know.” “It’s true,” she grinned. “But nobody does a haircut like Joe.” Joe went to get the paste for her hair treatment. She THE NEW JOUR NAL
checked to make sure he was out of earshot, then leaned in, like she was telling a bawdy secret: “Actually, I was a secretary. Not an accountant.” She winked. “But don’t tell him that.”
I
first heard of Joe from Matteo Rosati, my friend and former roommate. Matteo is from Rome. In Italian, his surname means of a pink hue. Given his propensity to sunburn, the description is accurate. The fall of Matteo’s freshman year, his mother Federica came to New Haven for move-in. While Matteo was at orientation, she found herself with nothing to do. So she went to the hairdresser. As she waited for an appointment, she overheard a Yale student ask for Joe Moscato. “Students come here?” she wondered. Then she thought of Matteo. She asked for Joe too. “From that moment, I don’t know why…he was so open, I told him my life story. No—I’m kidding. But I told him a lot,” she said over the phone from Rome. “I was a bit tragic.” Joe remembered her crying in the salon chair. (“Don’t say crying,” he told me, eyeing my scribbles appraisingly. “Say she was upset. She was upset her seventeen-year-old son was leaving for school in America.”) “So I said to her in Italian, ‘Don’t worry. I’ll take care of him.’” (Matteo says Joe’s Italian sounds a little old-fashioned, like a relic of his parents’ emigration to America from Sicily and Naples in the early 1900s.) At first, Federica didn’t believe him. “I really thought he saw a desperate woman and was only being kind,” she said. But she gave him Matteo’s number. Joe followed through. He stored Matteo’s books and clothes for the summer, had him over for dinner, and took him to buy a bike. When Matteo later fell off that bike and shattered his ankle, Joe was the third person he called, after his roommates and 911. And when Federica came to New Haven to help Matteo recover, Joe cooked for them. “I really like this idea a lot,” was the first thing she told me on the phone from Rome. “Writing an article about Joe. He deserves it.”
J
oe finished applying the treatment to Nancy’s hair, held up by clips above her scalp like a tulip bud. He set a timer, got her a magazine, and sat down to wait. I asked what he thinks makes him successful. “To be in this business, you have to a) like people, and b) like the work,” he says. “It’s a relationship. My clients become part of my family.”
— William Reid is a junior in Pierson College.
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schedule 9:00–9:30 am Breakfast
Undergraduate Judaic Studies Conference February 18, 2018 Bingham Hall Comparative Literature Library Yale University
9:30–9:45 am Welcome and Opening Remarks 9:45–11:00 am Session 1: Reimagining Liturgy European Domestic Piety in a Jewish Key: The Birth and Spread of the Custom to Sing Zemirot around the Shabbat Table Albert Kohn List College, Columbia University Jewish Women and Personal Prayer in Nineteenth Century Europe Hannah Srour McGill University Music as a Reflection of the Soul: Leonard Bernstein and Hashkiveinu Pamela Brenner Barnard College, Columbia University 11:00–11:15 am Break 11:15 am–12:30 pm Session 2: Jews in Their Political Contexts
keynote speaker Between Ancestry and Belief: ‘Judaism’ and ‘Hinduism’ in the Nineteenth-Century Professor Leora Batnitzky is the Ronald O. Perelman Professor of Jewish Studies and Chair of the Department of Religion at Princeton University. Her teaching and research interests include philosophy of religion, modern Jewish thought, hermeneutics, and contemporary legal and political theory. In 2002 she received Princeton’s Leora Batnitzky
President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching. She is the author of Idolatry
and Representation: The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig Reconsidered (Princeton, 2000), Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas: Philosophy and the Politics of Revelation (Cambridge, 2006), and How Judaism Became a Religion: An Introduction to Modern Jewish Thought (Princeton, 2011). Her current book project, tentatively titled “Conversion Before the Law: How Religion and Law Shape Each Other in the Modern World,” focuses on a number of contemporary legal cases concerning religious conversion in the U.S., Great Britain, Israel, and India. She is co-editor, with Ilana Pardes, of The Book of Job: Aesthetics, Ethics and Hermeneutics (de Gruyter, 2014) as well as co-editor, with Yonatan Brafman, of an anthology Jewish Legal Theories, for the Brandeis Library of Modern Jewish Thought. She is co-editing Institutionalizing Rights and Religion, with Hanoch Dagan, to be published by Cambridge University Press and is also co-editor, with Ra’anan Boustan, of the journal Jewish Studies Quarterly.
The Popes and the Jews of Rome: Attempts at Converting Roman Jews during the Catholic Counter-Reformation Gidon Halbfinger Columbia University The Convergence of Whiteness, Jewishness, and Xenophobia: An Examination of the Leo Frank Case Aryeh Roberts University of Maryland Past and Present Realities of the Sephardic Mystique Julia Kahn Yale University 12:30–2:00 pm Lunch 2:00–3:15 pm Session 3: Traditional Texts, New Interpretations Rainmaker: Power, Presumption, and Precipitation in the Stories of Honi the Circle-Maker Adina Goldman Northwestern University God Intended it for Good: Contrasting Conceptions of Divine Providence in the Biblical and Quranic Joseph Stories and Possible Implications for the Compositional History of Sura 12 Theo Motzkin Harvard University ‘Beautifully Did Beruriah Rule:’ Beruriah as Moral Expert in the Talmud Bavli Avigayil Halpern Yale University 3:15–3:30 pm Break 3:30–4:45 pm Session 4: Encountering the 20th Century My Yiddisha Mammy: New York Jews and Blackface in the Early Twentieth Century Helyn Steppa Barnard College, Columbia University Shaul Shochet’s Tiferet Yedidya: A Case Study in Early American Jewish Responsa Ezra Cohen Brandeis University Re-Union of Tongues: The Two Yiddish Translations of Abramovich’s ‘Shem un Yefes in a Vagon’ Corbin Allardice University of Chicago 4:45–5:00 Break 5:00–6:00 Keynote Address
Please RSVP to: undergraduatejudaicstudies@gmail.com
undergradjudaicsconference.com
Between Ancestry and Belief: ‘Judaism’ and ‘Hinduism’ in the Nineteenth-Century Professor Leora Batnitzky Professor of Jewish Studies and Chair, Department of Religion, Princeton University 6:30 pm Dinner for Conference Presenters and Organizers